User-Centric Emergency Management: a Disappearing Middleware Approach

In case of emergency, wireless and wired networks permit to reach people in several different ways with precise information about danger and advices on how to behave. This is possible only by exploiting knowledge about user preferences or requirements, impairments and device features. Moreover, measurements performed by sensors, peripherals and appliances provide information about user location that can augment the capabilities of traditional emergency management systems. Device interconnection and pervasive Internet access enable much more effective reactions to crisis or disaster scenarios; anyway, providing location-driven emergency plans on a per-user basis inherently introduces the problems of service orchestration and user profiling, leading to an enormous complexity in this information handling. We claim that simplicity and effectiveness in generating customized emergency plans can derive from the integration of existing emergency management systems with an infrastructure for the support of ubiquitous Internet access that takes care of the whole inherently significant information and relieves most users from any unnecessary detail. The paper also claims that one such middleware can take advantage from a simplification approach that makes its design extremely compact, by playing a role of service coordinator. We propose a middleware architecture approach that delegates responsibility for information processing to external and pluggable services and that overcomes the issue of complexity by composing services into workflow specifications, arranged depending on user profile and needs, while introducing, at the same time, a very limited overhead.