# A Data-Driven Situational Awareness System for Enhanced Air Cargo Operations Emergency Control
## 1 Introduction  
While different definitions have been introduced by many authors from the concept of the smart city, its description by [1] as a large conglomeration of citizens, businesses, institutions, and agencies working towards a continually improving quality of life, is one of the most illustrative. Airports are a crucial part of every large city globally that provide the means for pleasure transportation [2] as well as business development [3]. Besides, while sea-based cargo transfer dominates the global trading industry, air cargo is crucial for time-critical, high-value, and perishable goods [4]. Its importance in the latter case was emphasized during the last two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for the timely transfer of vaccinations and paramedic supplies [5]. As a result, air cargo operations are a \"living cell\" of any efficient smart city concept. Within the heart of air cargo operations lies the Unit Load Devices (ULDs). According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA) [6], an estimated one million aircraft ULD are operating in nearly all airports globally. ULDs are mainly primitive aluminum cage structures with minimal structural properties and substantial tar weight which penalizes the net loading capacity and fuel burn. They rely on permanent transportation components and crew intervention to be moved and secured in the cargo deck, which further increases aircraft weight, loading time, and operating cost. Moreover, being practically the only removable aircraft part that is handled by other than the operating crew members, ULDs have a strong impact on in-flight safety. After a series of cargo fire incidents, theFederal Aviation Administration (FAA) recently presented a new regulation [7] on fire-resistant ULDs. A potential emergency, threatening to humans' lives and the environment during the air cargo life cycle, from a simple fire to a major stability accident, is strongly related to the timely and accurate actions of the involved team(s) of First Responders (FRs). As a result, modern ULDs should be able to restrain the loads and provide fire immunity and/or suppression capabilities with enhanced information to FR teams [8]. The majority of studies on the field have to do with the management and optimization of the operation of ULDs [9, 10, 11, 12], mainly because there is a great impact on the delivery cost involved with cargo handling activities. In [13], a review of the most important efforts towards this direction is provided. Moreover, in [14], the authors provide an up-to-date list of key players within air cargo operations and briefly describe relevant issues from their different perspectives. While operational efficiency of air cargo transportation is of the utmost importance, unfortunately, incidents having cargo transfer as the core event are not rare. For air operations, the monitoring of the status of air cargo should be a topic of great interest due to the serious hazard of cargo which can lead to a safety-related alert. Battery presence is particularly dangerous since it turns what appears to be safe cargo into easily flammable cargo with a very detrimental effect on the carrier safety. Following [7], more than 100 incidents related to battery inflammation in cargo holds have been reported since 2019. More than half of them were related to the transfer of dangerous cargo, while 5% resulted in major operational destruction. Recent statistics [10] reveal a bleak picture of air cargo operations safety. As shown in Figure 1, almost 50% of accidents have to do with cargo, Low-Cost Carrier (LCC), and Full-Service Network Carrier (FSNC) operations. The number of efforts focusing on the safety and monitoring of ULDs is significantly lower, although there are some examples of solutions developed for the remote monitoring and control of cargo handling [15], Structural Health Monitoring [16, 17, 18], and intelligent fire detection systems [19, 20, 21].