A Framework combining Agile, User-centered design and Service Oriented Architecture approaches for Collaborative Disaster Management system Design

Abstract

Disaster management is a special type of human complex organisation in which heterogeneous human actors belonging to different authorities collaborate and work together with the shared aim to solve, or at least reduce, the disaster situation. Thus, the collaboration in this case within team members and with other teams operating at the disaster site(s) is very critical and complex; the achievement of the desired goal heavily depends on this collaboration. Interactive and easy to use services in these scenarios are very valuable and necessary as they can improve collaboration, coordination, and communication amongst team(s) to achieve the desired goals. For this purpose, in this paper, we propose a novel design framework for complex disaster management systems. We combine agile characteristics and principles, user-centred techniques and service-oriented architecture paradigm. Our aim is to take into account the needs of the disaster managers in an iterative development process, to improve the human actors' involvement in the design projects, to offer the possibility to accept any changes in order to produce highly usable and interactive service-based collaborative services.