An event-based approach to supporting team coordination and decision making in disaster management scenarios

Team coordination and decision making are critical factors to disaster management scenarios. The coordination and decision making should happen at least at two different levels: intra-coordination, that is the coordination among the members of a mobile team (e.g. members of a first aid team geographically distributed in disaster field) and intercoordination, that is coordination among different teams (e.g. a team of doctors and a municipality team). These issues become even more challenging due to the very different nature of teams, which should use various sources of heterogenous data information and should accomplish different tasks in a real time setting. Current approaches in supporting teams in disaster management, on the one hand, do not tackle the hierarchical coordination, and on the other either focus separately on data modelling or process modelling to support teams. Additionally, most of the coordination is based on human intervention. In this work, we take an event-based approach to support team coordination and decision taking at various levels. The proposed event-based model aims to link data sources and processes in order to automate as much as possible the assignment of tasks and process allocation of resources to teams during the disaster management and provide thus timely support to teams.