Mobile Emergency Management Services Targeting Large Public Events

Abstract

In recent years, natural disasters and terrorist attacks have been quite numerous, and broadly reported in the media. The tourism industry has been especially impacted by these emergencies. In order to mitigate the effects of such events, guaranteeing an adequate level of preparedness is essential. However, despite the extreme disrupting events that large-scale disasters such as tsunamis have had on tourism in specific areas, few tourism organizations have properly developed emergency strategies as an integral part of their business plans. Several national and supra-national initiatives are currently working on possibilities to employ mobile communication networks for emergency management systems. The success of such systems depends on users being familiar with the service though, which is difficult to achieve if the system is solely used for emergency management. Therefore, the authors propose a reference architecture that allows the integration of mobile value-adding services, allowing for broad usage outside of emergency cases and thus an increased familiarity. The authors also present a specific system design focusing on the case of large public events as an instantiation of the reference architecture, describe the implementation in some detail, and present the evaluation of the prototype implementation in a simulation study at a large public event.