WORKPAD: 2-Layered Peer-to-Peer for Emergency Management through Adaptive Processes
Tiziana Catarci, Fabio De Rosa, Massimiliano de Leoni, Massimo Mecella, Michèle Angelaccio, Schahram Dustdar, Begona Gonzalvez, Giuseppe Iiritano, Alenka Krek, Guido Vetere, Zdenek M. Zalis · 2006
In this paper, we present a recently funded European research project, namely WORKPAD, that aims at designing and developing an innovative software infrastructure (software, models, services, etc.) for supporting collaborative work of human operators in emergency/disaster scenarios. In such scenarios, different teams, belonging to different organizations, need to collaborate with one other to reach a common goal; each team member is equipped with handheld devices (PDAs) and communication technologies, and should carry on specific tasks. In such a case we can consider the whole team as carrying on a process, and the different teams (of the different organizations) collaborate through the "interleaving" of all the different processes (macro-process). Each team is supported by some back-end centre, and the different centres need to cooperate at an inter-organizational level to reach an effective coordination among teams. The project investigates a 2-level framework for such scenarios: a back-end peer-to-peer community, providing advanced services requiring high computational power, data & knowledge & content integration, and a set of front-end peer-to-peer communities, that provide services to human workers, mainly by adaptively enacting processes on mobile ad-hoc networks