Fanny PAGNIER is defending her doctoral thesis on Monday, June 19, 2023: « Decision support method to characterize the required vigilance in avalanche terrain »

The practice of mountain sports is subject to the risk of avalanches. In France, avalanches cause about thirty deaths each year among practitioners of ski touring, off-piste skiing, and mountaineering. In this context, the purpose of this work is to contribute to the improvement of decision support in avalanche risk management in order to minimize the number of accidents and incidents that occur each year. To achieve this, we clarify and attempt to address the various needs necessary for improving existing decision support methods.

The research work undertaken specifically focuses on the following motivations:

• Identifying, formalizing, and evaluating the information to be considered in the estimation of the current avalanche situation.
• Determining a final outcome that characterizes the level of vigilance required by practitioners in response to the local avalanche situation.

Thus, with the aim of assisting mountain professionals in their daily decision-making, our main objective is to take into account heterogeneous and multi-source information, combine it, and communicate a level of vigilance on which the user can conduct their analysis and make their decision. These efforts particularly involve implementing an information fusion method to aggregate multiple heterogeneous criteria, including those derived from field observations. This locally adopted level of vigilance, along a mountain skiing itinerary, should also be explainable. Therefore, our developments aim to reproduce expert knowledge, staying close to the experts’ reasoning and utilizing the terminology they employ.