Coordination of distributed collaborative activities for disaster management

Abstract

Abstract-It is very challenging for different organizations to coordinate together in dynamic situations like a disaster response. Each organization is autonomous and considers the situation from their point of view. There is no central authority to coordinate all operations. To coordinate their actions, organizations need to exchange information on what they are doing. However, they cannot share everything with everybody due to privacy, regulatory or strategic reasons. Currently, they only use e-mail, telephone or fax to exchange information. Thus, it is very difficult for them to detect and handle differences on their perception of the situation. We propose an approach for inter-organizational process management suited to these dynamic scenarios. It allows different organizations to share selected activities by replicating them optimistically in each other workspaces. The underlying system propagate the state changes to all workspace eventually. We explain detecting and handling of two different types of conflicts that can occur in this setting. We provide an implementation and explain how we have derived a first evaluation of the system.