Abstract: Investigations in development of efficient early warning systems (EWS) are essentially for prediction and warning of upcoming natural hazards. Besides providing of communication and computationally intensive infrastructure, the high resource reliability and hard deadline option are required for EWS scenarios processing in order to get guaranteed information in time-limited conditions. In this paper planning of EWS scenarios execution is investigated and the efficient hybrid algorithm for urgent workflows scheduling is developed based on traditional heuristic and meta-heuristic approaches within state-of-art cloud computing principles.

Abstract: The paper describes a real-time software system to support emergency planning decisions when ship flooding occurs. The events of grounding and collision are considered, where the risk of subsequent flooding of hull compartments is very high, and must be avoided or at least minimized. The system is based on a highly optimized algorithm that estimates, ahead in time, the progressive flooding of the compartments according to the current ship status and existent damages. Flooding times and stability parameters are measured, allowing for the crew to take the adequate measures, such as isolate or counter-flood compartments, before the flooding takes incontrollable proportions. The simulation is visualized in a Virtual Environment in real-time, which provides all the functionalities to evaluate the seriousness and consequences of the situation, as well as to test, monitor and carry out emergency actions. Being a complex physical phenomena that occurs in an equally complex structure such as a ship, the real-time flooding simulation combined with the Virtual Environment requires large computational power to ensure the reliability of the simulation results. Moreover, the distress normally experienced by the crew in such situations, and the urgent (and hopefully appropriate) required counter-measures, leave no room for inaccuracies or misinterpretations, caused by the lack of computational power, to become acceptable. For the events considered, the system is primarily used as a decision support tool to take urgent actions in order to avoid or at least minimize disastrous consequences such as oil spilling, sinking, or even loss of human lives.