A fully reconfigurable approach to Emergency Management

Emergency management is one of the most important areas where technology innovation has direct impact on social well-being and sustainability. In the past few years, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has proved to be instrumental to improve emergency management with particular focus on resilience, rapidity of response, adaptability to situations. To these ends, joint optimization of communication and computing is a promising cross-layer approach. Indeed, this paper is focused on the consideration of both cognitive and autonomic networking approaches when deploying an emergency management system. The cognitive approach was initially considered specifically for wireless communications, while the autonomic approach was initially introduced for managing complex computing systems; however, they share several similarities in dealing with fully reconfigurable systems. The future trend is to expand their influence toward the global optimization of the ICT infrastructure, as the authors show in this paper for the specific case of emergency management systems.