2011 20th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises Introduction to Collaborative Technology for Coordinating Crisis Management (CT2CM) track of WETICE-2011, Paris, France Chihab Hanachi Franc¸ois Charoy Serge Stinckwich Toulouse University, LORIA-INRIA-CNRS, IFI, MSI team IRIT Laboratory Universit´e de Lorraine IRD, UMI 209 UMMISCO rue Doyen Gabriel Marty, Vandoeuvre-l`es-Nancy Cedex, France Institut de la Francophonie pour l’Informatique, 31042 Toulouse Cedex, France charoy@loria.fr 42 Ta Quang Buu, Hanoi, Vietnam hanachi@univ-tlse1.fr Vietnam National University, Hanoi, Vietnam I NTRODUCTION TO THE SESSION In crisis situations (natural or industrial disasters, riots, ), the different actors managing crisis resolution have to act simultaneously in emergency to reduce its impacts on the real world To achieve this common goal as effectively and efficiently as possible, these actors (police, military forces, medical organizations, non-governmental organizations but also emerging groups) have to collaborate and act in a coordinated way In the term coordination, we include all the work needed for the actors, for the connected integration of their information systems and also for the flexible synchronization of their efforts, in order to handle the crisis in the most efficient way This coordination may occur during all the phases of a crisis, from the mitigation to the recovery phase Coordination raises several problems such as the definition of the universe of discourse, without which it would be impossible to solve the various semantic conflicts that are bound to occur between several autonomous and heterogeneous actors and their Information Systems It involves the finding of partners, emergent partners integration, their collective decisions, partners plans negotiation and the synchronization of the distributed and concurrent execution of their actions and plans Moreover, in a highly dynamic, open, unstable and uncertain environment, such as the one met in crisis context, coordination should be rethought to be more reactive, proactive, adaptive, robust and visible for all the partners while preserving the essential part of their autonomy In this context, organizations have developed in the years several team collaboration tools like SAHANA (http:// sahanafoundation.org/) or the WORKPAD infrastructure (http: //www.workpad-project.eu/) based on information and communication technologies, that facilitate the distribution of control and information exchanges and gathering useful to crisis coordination Giving this context, the aim of this track is to examine how collaborative technologies can simplify coordination and 1524-4547/11 $26.00 © 2011 IEEE DOI 10.1109/WETICE.2011.71 interworking between the different actors involved in the crisis management and its resolution It may concern the crisis management team, the actors on the field as well as their interactions It may concern also all the phases of the crisis resolution This track features regular papers and one short paper selected from submissions S UMMARY OF SELECTED PAPERS • • • • • (1) Lydia Kraus, Mladen Stanojevic, Nikola Tomasevic and Vuk Mijovic, A Decision Support System for Building Evacuation based on the EMILI SITE environment (2) Jăorn Franke, Franc¸ois Charoy and Cedric Ulmer, Handling Conflicts in Autonomous Coordination of Distributed Collaborative Activities (short paper) (3) Daouda Kamissoko, Franc¸ois Peres and Pascale Zarat´e, Infrastructure Network Vulnerability (4) Omar Gaci and Herv´e Mathieu, Deployment of Communicating Objects for A Dynamic Risk Management in Warehouse of Dangerous Goods (5) Cl´audio Sapateiro, Ant´onio Ferreira and Pedro Antunes, Evaluating the Use of Mobile Devices in Critical Incidents Response: A Microworld Approach The selected papers cover the following three main issues : Cooperative Information Gathering, Risks and Vulnerability, and Team Awareness Cooperative Information Gathering During a crisis, taking the right decision at the right time, considering the correct situation is crucial Lives are at stake and even recent experiences show that under the pressure of a crisis or of an emergency, errors are costly and most of the time not recoverable This is why it is so important, both in the preparation phase and in the mitigation phase to make available the best information and the best tools so that each kind of stakeholder can take the best informed decision Two 320 303 papers in this session aim to provide support to people to get a more accurate information in order to take better decisions The first one by Lydia Kraus et al (1) describes a decision support systems that help to determine the best evacuation path in case of emergency in large critical infrastructure such as airports Evacuation paths can be calculated in advance based on general data, but the event causing the emergency, the number of people on site and their location may have a deep impact on the most efficient way to evacuate a building and to avoid people to rush into deadly traps (blocked doors, burning stairs) The authors proposes to use all the knowledge available regarding the building and the situation, using event detected by the building appliances (smoke detectors, heat detectors) to generate dynamic evacuation plan This relies in the end on the availability of dynamic signs to propose to people the right direction to take at the right time This is an important trends that combine high end algorithmics with network of sensors to provide the right information at the right time, and potentially saving life This is the kind of information that would be required by the stakeholder in crisis management that have to take decisions about the action to conduct in order to mitigate a crisis situation as described in the second paper by Jăorn Franke et al (2) Here again, providing the right information to the right people of different organisation is considered as the key for providing a timely answer to unforeseen events Here, the emphasis is put on ensuring that people from different organisations have the same view on what is going on and more precisely on the potential conflicts that may occur between their respective views During a crisis, a lot of problems occur because of wrong expectation of stakeholder regarding the outcome of the actions conducted by others One may expect that a road is closed where another decided to reopen it Based on a distributed activity model, the authors of this paper propose to detect and resolve inconsistency or conflicts between the view of different users on a given situation, from the activity perspective Their approach tries to ensure that at least stakeholders are aware of that they are considering a conflicting view on an activity The expectation is that considering this information, they will communicate to resolve the situation Combined with some advanced decision support system, there is no doubt that this kind of approach could some day make a difference human phenomena not under control After a state of the art on networks and vulnerability models in the academic literature, several vulnerability factors are discussed Eventually, a general model of vulnerability analysis including societal parameters is presented Omar Gaci and al (4) presents some results from the european research RESCUE-IT project The aim of this project is to propose new means to model and improve the supply chain security and resilience where involved partners collaborate to create risk management policies The supply chain studied is a warehouse located in France that stored very dangerous chemical goods like aerosol or fertilizer These goods are monitored in real time thanks to communicating objects like RFIDs tags and sensors This surveillance helps to coordinate dynamic risk management policies in order to respect storage constraints, forklift cargo falls and rack failures Data gathered by sensors are stored in a centralized Information System with filters and treats them Alerts and specific procedures can be triggered in case of constraint storages are not respected or if the rack structure is damaged Team Awareness Team Awareness is probably a precondition for an efficient coordination and notably for ensuring a coherent behavior of team members, the sharing of their resources and the distribution of their tasks The paper written by Cl´audio Sapateiro et al (5) studies the influence of mobile devices (such as VoIP, PDA) on team situation awareness and performance in critical incidents response A microworld environment is used for supporting scenarios and experimentations The work is illustrated with helpdesk teams solving computer network failures Also, the paper provides a comprehensive and coherent literature survey on situation awareness and team situation awareness ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We thank all members of the program committee for their careful work in reviewing and selecting the contributions Risks and vulnerability Societies depends now on complex infrastructure and especially on technological networks like the one usually found in transportation, energy, or telecommunications, The work presented in the paper from Daouda Kamissoko and al (3) aims to propose a methodology of analyzing infrastructure network vulnerability in the field of prevention or reduction of the natural disaster consequences This analysis should be done at design or execution time The authors defines vulnerability and risks according to three elements: Population affected by hazard, Territory where infrastructures lies (including technological networks) and Hazard, natural or 304 321 ... provide the right information at the right time, and potentially saving life This is the kind of information that would be required by the stakeholder in crisis management that have to take decisions... helps to coordinate dynamic risk management policies in order to respect storage constraints, forklift cargo falls and rack failures Data gathered by sensors are stored in a centralized Information... the action to conduct in order to mitigate a crisis situation as described in the second paper by Jăorn Franke et al (2) Here again, providing the right information to the right people of different