We present an ongoing project aimed to support the management of the procedures, mainly the handling of emergency calls, for the centralized regional emergency management agency (Protezione Civile Regionale in Italian). The main goal consists in enabling the sharing of information among di erent active locations that are in charge of acting in any emergency which occurs on the territory. We present a prototype version of the system that has been implemented by following the Calabrian Emergency Management agency speci cations. The system is in charge of collecting information regarding various types of emergency such as earthquakes, oods, stormy seas and other extreme weather conditions. In addition, the system o ers some functionalities for the management of emergency teams as well as volunteers and available resources (e.g., vehicles) by means of the application of geographical optimization paths. The requirements include also the design and development of a mobile application allowing citizens notify in real-time emergency conditions (e.g., forest res during summer time).
We here present an ongoing project and a system prototype that has been de ning with PCR. Recently, PCR decided to make a reorganization of its telecommunications infrastructure, application procedures and communication ows through regional sites and, as a consequence, it has to integrate all the communication facilities through the de nition of a centralized structure. The aim is to de ne a datacenter where information regarding: (i) emergency calls and catastrophe monitoring; (ii) source data management (iii) protocols applications to save life and people as in case of earthquakes or oods or landslides due to heavy rains. The PCR is in charge of apply intervention even in case of car accidents or problems in reaching populations. ICT protocols and infrastructures are in charge of being updated in Calabria Region. We here report about the de nition of a new work ow implementing what is currently managed without automatic procedures.
The idea is to de ne a system able to manage the emergency calls by means of pages and multimedia information that has to be organized by the central operative unit. For instance in the following we report a possible scenario: 1. a citizen is in trouble because of extreme weather conditions; 2. he calls the PCR with an help request; 3. the incident room gets the help request which is assigned an emergency level; 4. a new intervention request is generated and sent to other operative rooms; 5. the nearest operative room identi es a team and the needed resources; 6. the team intervenes and sends feedback back to the incident room; 7. the incident room shares the information with other rooms; 8. eventually the incident is closed and archived.
An e cient emergency response is strongly related to a careful and attentive prevention activity and emergency planning, which are preliminarily carried out before any emergency occurs. In order to predict possible aws which could occur on the territory, the PCR has many systems and operational sources already working. Some of the preliminary goals of our work with the PCR have been: (i) identi cation and analysis of the existing components of the PCR information system already in use; (ii) de nition and planning of the extraction, transformation and loading procedures from the operational sources towards an integrated database; (iii) de nition and implementation of a new information system for the emergency management.
PCR is a Regional Public Administration Unit which is part of a network of other Regional units who refer to the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. It is composed by 180 employees, 91 of which work in the incident rooms (21 for each turn). Each of the incident room dislocated on the territory, is in need to share information about resources, events and updates in real time. Furthermore, due to the inherent complexity and unpredictability of emergency events, the interaction for a human operator with the system has to be minimal and extremely e cient. We decided to design and implement an information system with a lightweight web-based interface implementing an integrated and interactive dashboard for the incident rooms, which allows to perform: { scenario analysis and planning - allowing a PCR operator to acquire and visualize all the data about the event and to plan and enumerate the resources around it; { environmental monitoring network - able to retrieve and visualize real time information from the regional sensor network; { models from intervention scenarios - a system module able to analyze use cases from the past, ranking them by similarity with the current emergency event; { inspection reports - with which PCR operators can obtain detailed reports about present and past emergency events; { vehicles and resources management - a dedicated module for the e cient planning and management of emergency vehicles.
A rst conceptualization of the integrated dashboard for emergency data management is depicted in Figure 1, which reports a simulation of an emergency event with its related data aggregated and updated in real time.
From the initial analysis phase we identi ed a set of existing systems and information sources in the PCR: (i) SITGE (Sistema Informativo Territoriale per la Gestione delle Emergenze) system, an old and unmaintained web-based geographical information system developed with ESRI technology, containing partial data for the emergency management with particular reference to re events visualization, (ii) GIOVE (Portale per la Gestione Integrata delle Organizzazioni di Volontariato nelle Emergenze di Protezione Civile) a database containing voluntary associations informations about vehicles and resources, (iii) an hardware/software system for the management of re emergencies composed of 12 stations with high de nition cameras, thermal cameras, humidity, temperature and wind direction sensors implementing a prediction model and a decision support system in the event of a re; (iv) a regional isofrequency microwave radio network, used for emergency radio communication, covering 80% of the territory with nodes at 10-15 km from each other. 2
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TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) is an ETSI standard to build specialist Professional Mobile Networks (http://www.etsi.org/technologies-clusters/ technologies/tetra). The low frequency used by TETRA guarantees an excellent geographic coverage. TETRA is speci cally intended for Police Fire Brigades, Army, etc., and its relays are generally arranged so that, even if some of them go down, the others can cover most of the area.
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Each italian region has its own Emergency Management Information System. Usually, a platform of this type has a set of modules allowing to manage the objects of the domain (events, volunteers, vehicles, maps, etc.) and their interactions (e.g. http://www2.regione.piemonte.it/protezionecivile/index.php/ sistema-informativo ).
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The system, here proposed, starts from requirements of the new PCR and
it is in plan with respect to new italian reorganization due to recent natural
disasters. We plan to include logistic and algorithms to plan rescues, resources
according to land orography and streets. The idea is to create an emergency
support system for the PCR able to feed a continuously growing database of
events and interventions which will be valuable for research because data contains
both spatial and temporal dimensions, which can be exploited through spatial
and temporal techniques and models (see [
We designed a rst system prototype by using deployment of components. Figure 2 shows the components layers: (i) the visual part of the emergency management prototype (presentation layer) consists of the JSP pages that contain the views of the data; (ii)the middleware level hosts the web application and data access module and (iii) the database level which is an instance of MySQL database. Figure 2 reports components and their interactions. The functionalities regard also the possibility of signalling emergency cases by using a mobile app. A citizen can take a picture and de ne one of the possible application emergency cases. Citizen position as well as personal data (in case of availability in supporting rescuers) can be sent with simple steps. The system prototype has been implemented in a cloud based environment, to maximize system scalability, availability and redundancy. In order to preserve the integrity and privacy of PCR's own data, we set up an instance of the OwnCloud environment exclusively used by the PCR, to support the functionalities of the presented system, some of which are: (i ) artifact exchange among incident rooms, (ii ) end users' data acquisition and storage from the mobile app, (iii ) storage of daily and periodic reports about PCR emergency management. Nevertheless the adoption of a proprietary cloud environment has some drawbacks. For instance, the limited number of nodes implies some potential problems regarding the application scalability, while the management of the cloud architecture itself can be a costly and complex task to be sustained by the PCR.
Emergency can be managed in one of the operative units by accessing to a web screen where the emergency is veri ed and validated, and intervention protocols are selected and applied. Resources are also managed as well as the evolution of rescues activities. Consider that in case of emergency the communication activities and signals reach an high frequency in terms of number of call or app instances, thus the system should be able to track the activities. PCR has to both (i) avoid loosing emergency alerts as well as (ii) lter out the less relevant ones. Algorithms to prevent and automatically manage the relevance of alerts can be applied.
Figure 3 reports an example of using the developed application. There are di erent user pro les. A citizen can apply sending information about emergency situation with pictures and giving the status (e.g., available, not available) in staying on site to give information in case of emergency updates (e.g., re conditions) in case of safe observation position.
The work ow process has been designed by using a model called rasor model (standing for Rapporto Attivita Sala Operativa Regionale) which contains information regarding emergency protocols. It contains alerting messages classi cation, municipality, location and closest emergency team for the event; type and status of the event; rescue team reports and emergency updates; resource details and emergency status time tracking; nal reports. The database has been designed using such a schema (a snapshot in italian is reported in Figure 4). It maps the rasor model where emergency signaling regarding reports on new emergency are annotated by PCR operators.
Finally in Figure 5 we report the database schema used to map the information related to the resource and rescue management.
Firstly, we report a typical use case implemented by the PCR incident rooms in an emergency, at present time: (i ) an emergency call arrives at one of the incident rooms by phone; (ii ) the operator asks for details and compiles the paper registry (which is a non-shared distributed resource); (iii ) the operator is in charge of distributing the news by phone to the other incident rooms; (iv ) the decisor (e.g., PCR's Director) plans the intervention(s) and orders the teams to intervene on site; (v ) the various teams give feedbacks on the intervention status back to the incident room via phone.
We here report some use cases implemented with the system to automatize the use case shown above and others encountered during the requirement analysis for the PCR.
Gathering emergency calls. Currently PCR has already implemented a number of initiatives for the dissemination of competence information through the use of social networks in addition to more traditional communication channels. In order to ensure similar fruition and the maximum possible dissemination of information, the system acquires calls and information coming from web based communication channel (mobile one). Furthermore, the mobile interface will be integrated with the most used social networks (i.e., facebook, twitter) but also the backend will gather comments and enquiries coming from the PCR social network pages and analyze them, rendering ad-hoc statistics on the system dashboard for the PCR management.
Managing resources. As part of the reorganization of the management of mobile vehicles, the system o ers a eet management module to provide an additional ow of information of great importance in the management of emergency situations. Modeling of minimum risk routes is still an open research topic, as well as the development of algorithms to simulate scenarios on networks. Fire management System. Information regarding re events, are acquired from an already existing module and the information is mapped on the dashboard with the location as well as the sequence of intervention updates.