A Collaborative Information System Architecture for Process-Based Crisis Management

Abstract

In computer-based crisis management, participating actors have to put in common their information systems (IS). One of the main issues they have to face is to interoperate and coordinate these ISs in order to ease their collaborations and take the right decisions at the right moment. For that, they have to set up a Collaborative Information System (CIS) for orchestrating a Collaborative Process (CP) whose activities are performed by the participating ISs. The aim of this paper is to define the functional requirements of such a CIS and then to propose a conceptual architecture meeting these requirements. This architecture supports a perception-decision-action iteration for crisis reduction. Indeed, it provides means to capture information about the impacted real world, to support the definition and the adaptation of the CP managing the crisis reduction, and to coordinate and assign to each participant the actions to be undertaken. These actions modify the real world and lead to perform a new iteration until the crisis resolution.