WORKPAD: an Adaptive Peer-to-Peer Software Infrastructure for Supporting Collaborative Work of Human Operators in Emergency/Disaster Scenarios

The system presented in the paper is the main result of an on-going European research project WORKPAD (IST- 2005-5-034749) that aims at building 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 each 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 way we can consider the whole team as carrying on a process (macro-process), and the different teams (of the different organizations) collaborate through the interleaving of all the different processes. The idea is to investigate 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.