Interoperability in Emergency Management. A Solution Based on Distributed Databases and P2P Networks


Marcelo Zambrano, Francisco Pérez, Manuel Esteve, Carlos Palau




To successfully confront a disaster, coordinated and collaborative participation of multiple agencies related to public safety is essential by ensuring a response consistent with the requirements of the emergency environment and of those affected. Therefore, permanent information exchange between the agencies involved becomes mandatory, thus enabling them to combine their efforts towards best facing the emergency. This article describes an interoperability platform architecture which allows the exchange of information between the agencies concerned in the management of an emergency through the use of their own information systems and computer tools. The architecture core resides inside the Shared Information Space, in charge of managing the information from the systems integrated within the platform as a single storage entity. It is founded on a non-relational distributed database and a P2P communications network devised to share out the workload between all the platform nodes, thus conferring availability and scalability to the architecture.