Emergency Management: from User Requirements to a Flexible P2P Architecture

In this paper, we present an high level architecture for emergency management systems devised in the European research project WORKPAD. Such an architecture is specifically tailored in supporting collaborative work of human operators during emergencies: different teams, belonging to different organizations, need to collaborate in order to reach a common goal. The most effective way to design a system matching users needs is to perform a User-Centered Design; it relies on continuous interactions with end-users in order to understand better and better how organizations are arranged during emergencies, which data are exchanged and which steps are performed by organizations to face disastrous events. This paper illustrates the methodology used to collect user needs and an example. Then, requirements are made valid in a wider range of situations, and finally we describe the WORKPAD architecture stemming from such requirements.