Pervasive Software Environments for Supporting Disaster Responses

In complex emergency scenarios, teams from various emergency-response organizations must collaborate. These teams include both first responders, such as police and fire departments, and those operators who coordinate the effort from operational centers. The Workpad architecture consists of a front-and a back-end layer. The front-end layer is composed of several front-end teams of first responders, and the back-end layer is an integrated peer-to-peer network that lets front-end teams collaborate through information exchange and coordination. Team members at the front end carry PDAs, with team leaders' PDAs equipped with gateway communication technologies that let them communicate with the back-end centers.