Generic Workflows - A Utility to Govern Disastrous Situations.

Damage caused by natural hazards is increasing all over the world. All countries intensify their efforts to predict and prevent hazard events and to decrease disaster impact. Disaster management is one of the challenging, complex and critical application areas dealing with hyper dynamic situation changes, high velocity, voluminous data and organizational heterogeneity. Successful management of disaster response requires flexible and adaptable solution techniques including very accurate, fast and dynamic activity guidance for supporting of process coordination, decision making and information logistics in real-time.Systems currently existing are mostly inapplicable for this challenging application area due to their almost exclusive support of structured pre-defined processes in a static environment. We propose to use generic workflows that satisfy these complex requirements and that provide support for organizing processes and information flow in disaster situations thereby providing decision support to crisis managers and "first responders". We illustrate our approach in a sample landslide scenario observed in the Austrian Alps.