WORKPAD – Collaboration Software for Emergency Teams

WORKPAD aims at developing an innovative software infrastructure for supporting collaborative work of human operators in emergency scenarios. In such scenarios, different teams, belonging to different organizations, need to collaborate with each other to reach a common goal. Each team member is equipped with portable devices and carries on specific assigned tasks. In such a way we can consider the whole team as carrying on a process, and different teams collaborate through the “interleaving” of all the different processes.

Two-level Framework
Each team is supported by some back-end center, and the different centers need to cooperate at an inter-organizational level to reach an effective coordination among teams. The back-end centers thus form a virtual organization.

The goal is to devise a two-level framework for such scenarios: an integrated back-end peer-to-peer community, providing advanced services requiring high computational power, knowledge and content integration, and a set of front-end peer-to-peer communities, that provide services, mainly by adaptively enacting processes on mobile ad-hoc networks to human workers.