In this paper, we present a recently funded Euro-Disaster is a broad term; for the purpose of the work pean research project, namely WORKPAD, that aims at designing presented in this paper, disasters can be defined as a serious and developing an innovative software infrastructure (software, disruption of the functioning of a community or a society causmodels, services, etc.) for supporting collaborative work of human operators in emergency/disaster scenarios. In such scenarios, ing whidespr

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... m a,bmaterial e conio ni tal different teams, belonging to different organizations, need to losses which exceed the ability of the affected community or collaborate with one other to reach a common goal; each team society to cope using its own resources [1]. member is equipped with handheld devices (PDAs) and communi- The total systematic coordination activities for the prevencation technologies, and should carry on specific tasks. In such a tion and respectively the coverage of natural and man-made case we can consider the whole team as carrying on a process, and disasters are termed as disaster management activities. These the different teams (of the different organizations) collaborate ac tes are grm ed as fivemases, activited These through the "interleaving" of all the different processes (macro-activities can be grouped into five phases, as suggested by [3], process). Each team is supported by some back-end centre, and [4]. They are structured by time and function for all types of the different centres need to cooperate at an inter-organizational disasters (see Figure 1 ). These phases are related to each other level to reach an effective coordination among teams. The project and they involve different types of skills. will investigate a 2-level framework for such scenarios: a back-. . . end peer-to-peer community, providing advanced services requir- The preventive measures are dividedinto planning, mitigaing high computational power, data & knowledge & content tion and preparedness activities. During the planning phase integration, and a set of front-end peer-to-peer communities, it is necessary to analyze and document the possibility of an that provide services to human workers, mainly by adaptively emergency event or a disaster and the potential consequences enacting processes on mobile ad-hoc networks. or impacts on life, property and environment. The results of this phase are essential for the next preventive phases. I. INTRODUCTION Mitigation activities eliminate or reduce the probability of a The widespread availability of network-enabled handheld disaster. It includes long-term activities designed to reduce devices (e.g., PDAs with WiFi/UMTS capabilities, TETRA the effects of unavoidable disasters. In the preparedness phase smart terminals, etc.) has made the development of pervasive governments, organizations and individuals, develop plans computing environments an emerging reality, very suitable for to save lives and minimize disaster damage. Preparedness managing emergency/disaster situations. measures seek to enhance disaster response operations.