WORKPAD: 2-Layered Peer-to-Peer for Emergency Management through Adaptive Processes

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