RISKS AND OTHER CRITICAL FACTORS. The consortium has identified the factors that are critical to the final success of the project and defined methods and procedures to identify, assess, monitor and control areas of risk; see Appendix A for more details.
RISKS AND OTHER CRITICAL FACTORS. All the partners have already been part of international projects and are aware that innovative and prototypical work like this is subject to a number of risks. This constitutes a good reference for the Steering Committee which will oversee and monitor the developments throughout the project. The consortium will identify the factors that are critical to the smooth execution and final success of the project and control these factors. For this purpose, the consortium will define methods and procedures to identify, assess, monitor and control areas of risk. The challenge underlying the project has been carefully analysed. Significant risks and contingency plans have been already identified, and for each one a possible contingency solution has been selected. If necessary, this plan will be re- assessed and updated throughout the execution of the project in order to reflect more flexibility and adjustment to changes that may occur in the dynamic environment that surrounds the project (both external and internal). As will be seen below on selected examples the key, effective element of risk management is the iterative strategy that we pursue, where the complexity of the problem under investigation is incrementally increased. Instead a ‘go for broke’ strategy we ensure that the most ambitious goals can be achieved in a step by step manner with each step being a significant scientific advance by itself. Scientific risks Risk description Evaluation Resolution Performance of activity recognition system below expected values (see quantified specific objectives) Impact low, Prob. medium Given the novelty of the approach pursued by OPPORTUNITY it is difficult to estimate the future performance of such a system. While we expect to outperform traditional state of the art systems when sensor configuration changes, it is difficult to estimate by how much, and it is difficult to estimate what are the costs of adaptation in situations where sensor configurations do not change. This is part of the research we conduct in OPPORTUNITY. The 3-stage approach allows us to regularly validate the OPPORTUNITY methods in case studies. The specification of the following stage case study reflects the outcomes of the previous one. As a consequence, the case study may be adjusted to better investigate unexpected aspects of the methods outcomes, and/or emphasize specific positive outcomes (e.g through complexity reduction, or design of specific case studies to address one adaptation method)...
