Electric grid faults can ignite catastrophic wildfires, particularly in regions with high winds and low humidity. In real-time operations, electric utilities have few options for wildfire risk ...mitigation, leading to use of disruptive measures such as proactive de-energization of equipment, frequently referred to as public safety power shut-offs. Such power shut-offs have significant impacts on customers, who experience power cuts in an attempt to protect them from fires. This work proposes the optimal power shut-off problem, an optimization model to support short-term operational decision making in the context of extreme wildfire risk. Specifically, the model optimizes grid operations to maximize the amount of power that can be delivered, while proactively minimizing the risk of wildfire ignitions by selectively de-energizing components in the grid. This is the first optimization model to consider how preventive wildfire risk measures impact both wildfire risk and power systems reliability at a short-term, operational time-frame. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated on an augmented version of the RTS-GMLC test case, located in Southern California, and compared against two approaches based on simple risk thresholds. The proposed optimization-based model reduces both wildfire risk and lost load shed relative to the benchmarks.
Background:
Canadian public safety personnel (PSP; e.g., correctional workers, dispatchers, firefighters, paramedics, police officers) are exposed to potentially traumatic events as a function of ...their work. Such exposures contribute to the risk of developing clinically significant symptoms related to mental disorders. The current study was designed to provide estimates of mental disorder symptom frequencies and severities for Canadian PSP.
Methods:
An online survey was made available in English or French from September 2016 to January 2017. The survey assessed current symptoms, and participation was solicited from national PSP agencies and advocacy groups. Estimates were derived using well-validated screening measures.
Results:
There were 5813 participants (32.5% women) who were grouped into 6 categories (i.e., call center operators/dispatchers, correctional workers, firefighters, municipal/provincial police, paramedics, Royal Canadian Mounted Police). Substantial proportions of participants reported current symptoms consistent with 1 (i.e., 15.1%) or more (i.e., 26.7%) mental disorders based on the screening measures. There were significant differences across PSP categories with respect to proportions screening positive based on each measure.
Interpretation:
The estimated proportion of PSP reporting current symptom clusters consistent with 1 or more mental disorders appears higher than previously published estimates for the general population; however, direct comparisons are impossible because of methodological differences. The available data suggest that Canadian PSP experience substantial and heterogeneous difficulties with mental health and underscore the need for a rigorous epidemiologic study and category-specific solutions.
In the rapidly evolving industry of autonomous vehicles, the ability to successfully provide vehicle level ADAS measurements will be key to the future of this market and address public safety ...concerns. This presentation looks at one set of EMC based tests that are being developed to help OEM's and test labs validate the RF performance of these systems under controlled and repeatable conditions.
En la última década, España ha llevado a cabo una serie de reformas para fortalecer la capacidad de la administración de prestar servicios de alta calidad a los ciudadanos y a las empresas, ...fomentando así la transparencia y la rendición de cuentas. Uno de los principales esfuerzos encabezados por la Oficina Nacional de Auditoría (ONA), entidad dependiente de la Intervención General de la Administración del Estado (IGAE), es el sistema de supervisión continua (SSC), una metodología basada en análisis de riesgos que actúa como prueba de fuego para la salud financiera, y la eficacia y la sostenibilidad de las instituciones públicas.
Canadian Public Safety Personnel (e.g., correctional workers, dispatchers, firefighters, paramedics, and police) are regularly exposed to potentially traumatic events, some of which are highlighted ...as critical incidents warranting additional resources. Unfortunately, available Canadian public safety personnel data measuring associations between potentially traumatic events and mental health remains sparse. The current research quantifies estimates for diverse event exposures within and between several categories of public safety personnel. Participants were 4,441 public safety personnel (31.7% women) in 1 of 6 categories (i.e., dispatchers, correctional workers, firefighters, municipal/provincial police, paramedics, and Royal Canadian Mounted Police). Participants reported exposures to diverse events including sudden violent (93.8%) or accidental deaths (93.7%), serious transportation accidents (93.2%), and physical assaults (90.6%), often 11+ times per event. There were significant relationships between potentially traumatic event exposures and all mental disorders. Sudden violent death and severe human suffering appeared particularly related to mental disorder symptoms, and therein potentially defensible as critical incidents. The current results offer initial evidence that (a) potentially traumatic event exposures are diverse and frequent among diverse Canadian public safety personnel; (b) many different types of exposure can be associated with mental disorders; (c) event exposures are associated with diverse mental disorders, including but not limited to posttraumatic stress disorder, and mental disorder screens would be substantially reduced in the absence of exposures; and (d) population attributable fractions indicated a substantial reduction in positive mental disorder screens (i.e., between 29.0 and 79.5%) if all traumatic event exposures were eliminated among Canadian public safety personnel.
Le personnel de sécurité publique canadien (p. ex. les travailleurs des services correctionnels, les répartiteurs, les ambulanciers et les
policiers) sont régulièrement exposés à des événements au potentiel traumatique, certains desquels sont présentés comme des événements critiques justifiant le recours à des ressources additionnelles. Malheureusement, les données disponibles concernant le personnel de sécurité publique canadien qui permettraient de mesurer les associations entre les événements au potentiel traumatique et la santé mentale se font encore rares. La recherche actuelle quantifie les estimations liées à l'exposition à divers incidents parmi plusieurs catégories de personnel de sécurité publique. Au total, 4 441 membres du personnel de sécurité publique (dont 31,7 % de femmes) de six catégories différentes (répartiteurs, travailleurs des services correctionnels, pompiers, policiers municipaux/provinciaux, ambulanciers et agents de la Gendarmerie royale canadienne) ont pris part à l'étude. Parmi les événements rapportés par les participants, notons des morts violentes subites (93,8 %) ou accidentelles (93,7 %), des accidents de la route graves (93,2 %) et des agressions physiques (90,6 %). Souvent, les participants s'étaient retrouvés confrontés 11 fois ou plus à de tels événements. Des relations déterminantes ont été observées entre l'exposition à des événements traumatisants et l'ensemble des troubles mentaux. Les morts violentes subites et la souffrance humaine aiguë semblaient particulièrement reliées aux symptômes de trouble mental. Il était donc justifié de les considérer comme des incidents critiques. Les résultats actuels permettent d'entrée de jeu de conclure que (a) les expositions à des événements au potentiel traumatique sont diversifiées et fréquentes parmi l'ensemble du personnel de sécurité publique; (b) de nombreux types d'expositions peuvent être associés à divers troubles de santé mentale, notamment le trouble de stress post-traumatique, et les tests de dépistage de troubles mentaux seraient considérablement réduits en l'absence d'exposition; et (d) les fractions étiologiques du risque indiquaient une réduction substantielle des résultats positifs aux tests de dépistage de troubles mentaux (soit entre 29,0 % et 79,5 %) si toutes les expositions à des événements traumatisants étaient éliminées chez le personnel de sécurité publique canadien.
Public Significance Statement
Growing evidence suggests that many first responders and other public safety personnel in Canada may be experiencing substantial difficulties with symptoms of mental health disorders. There have been suggestions that such difficulties may be associated with increased exposure to potentially traumatic events as part of working in public safety, with some people suggesting specific types of events may be particularly problematic. The current results support both suggestions and may be important for informing the national action plan mandated by the Prime Minister of Canada.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is undeniably transforming the way that organizations communicate and organize everyday businesses and industrial procedures. Its adoption has proven well suited for ...sectors that manage a large number of assets and coordinate complex and distributed processes. This survey analyzes the great potential for applying IoT technologies (i.e., data-driven applications or embedded automation and intelligent adaptive systems) to revolutionize modern warfare and provide benefits similar to those in industry. It identifies scenarios where Defense and Public Safety (PS) could leverage better commercial IoT capabilities to deliver greater survivability to the warfighter or first responders, while reducing costs and increasing operation efficiency and effectiveness. This article reviews the main tactical requirements and the architecture, examining gaps and shortcomings in existing IoT systems across the military field and mission-critical scenarios. The review characterizes the open challenges for a broad deployment and presents a research roadmap for enabling an affordable IoT for defense and PS.
Effective emergency and natural disaster management depend on the efficient mission-critical voice and data communication between first responders and victims. Land mobile radio system (LMRS) is a ...legacy narrowband technology used for critical voice communications with limited use for data applications. Recently, long term evolution (LTE) emerged as a broadband communication technology that has a potential to transform the capabilities of public safety technologies by providing broadband, ubiquitous, and mission-critical voice and data support. For example, in the United States, FirstNet is building a nationwide coast-to-coast public safety network based on LTE broadband technology. This paper presents a comparative survey of legacy and the LTE-based public safety networks, and discusses the LMRS-LTE convergence as well as mission-critical push-to-talk over LTE. A simulation study of LMRS and LTE band class 14 technologies is provided using the NS-3 open source tool. An experimental study of APCO-25 and LTE band class 14 is also conducted using software-defined radio to enhance the understanding of the public safety systems. Finally, emerging technologies that may have strong potential for use in public safety networks are reviewed.
There are growing concerns about the impact of public safety work on the mental health of public safety personnel; as such, we explored systemic and individual factors that might dissuade public ...safety personnel from seeking care. Public safety personnel barriers to care-seeking include the stigma associated with mental disorders and frequent reports of insufficient access to care. To better understand barriers to care-seeking, we thematically analyzed the optional open-ended final comments provided by over 828 Canadian public safety personnel as part of a larger online survey designed to assess the prevalence of mental disorders among public safety personnel. Our results indicated that systematic processes may have (1) shaped public safety personnel decisions for care-seeking, (2) influenced how care-seekers were viewed by their colleagues, and (3) encouraged under-awareness of personal mental health needs. We described how public safety personnel who do seek care may be viewed by others; in particular, we identified widespread participant suspicion that coworkers who took the time to address their mental health needs were “abusing the system.” We explored what constitutes “abusing the system” and how organizational structures—systematic processes within different public safety organizations—might facilitate such notions of abuse. We found that understaffing may increase scrutiny of injured public safety personnel by those left to manage the additional burden; in addition, cynicism and unacknowledged structural stigma may emerge, preventing the other public safety personnel from identifying their mental health needs and seeking help. Finally, we discuss how system-level stigma can be potentiated by fiscal constraints when public safety personnel take any leave of absence, inadvertently contributing to an organizational culture wherein help-seeking for employment-related mental health concerns becomes unacceptable. Implications for public safety personnel training and future research needs are discussed.
In scenarios, like critical public safety communication networks, On-Scene Available (OSA) user equipment (UE) may be only partially connected with the network infrastructure, e.g., due to physical ...damages or on-purpose deactivation by the authorities. In this work, we consider multi-hop Device-to-Device (D2D) communication in a hybrid infrastructure where OSA UEs connect to each other in a seamless manner in order to disseminate critical information to a deployed command center. The challenge that we address is to simultaneously keep the OSA UEs alive as long as possible and send the critical information to a final destination (e.g., a command center) as rapidly as possible, while considering the heterogeneous characteristics of the OSA UEs. We propose a dynamic adaptation approach based on machine learning to improve a joint energy-spectral efficiency (ESE). We apply a Q-learning scheme in a hybrid fashion (partially distributed and centralized) in learner agents (distributed OSA UEs) and scheduler agents (remote radio heads or RRHs), for which the next hop selection and RRH selection algorithms are proposed. Our simulation results show that the proposed dynamic adaptation approach outperforms the baseline system by approximately 67% in terms of joint energy-spectral efficiency, wherein the energy efficiency of the OSA UEs benefit from a gain of approximately 30%. Finally, the results show also that our proposed framework with C-RAN reduces latency by approximately 50% w.r.t. the baseline.
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