An Information System Design Framework for Environmental Risk and Emergency Management

Monitoring environmental risks for public safety applications (i.e. fire prediction, landslides forecasting, sea/river monitoring, etc.) requires an accurate model of involved phenomenological aspects, entities, actors, stakeholders as well as their articulated interactions. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of such scenarios several models are typically developed to address both concerns and information needs of heterogeneous skilled actors (e.g. geologists, geophysicists, chemists, managers, etc.), generally resulting in a fragmented process design. This paper goes in the opposite direction, i.e., we introduce a framework for designing collaborative processes for environmental risk and emergency management processes at multiple levels of detail. More specifically, through the use of UML models we provide a detailed description of ”the system of systems” articulated scenario which proves to be effective in designing risk evaluation and assessment processes. The application case is that of the rock face collapse forecasting in the alps, where the hydrogeological risk affects urban areas implemented into a multidisciplinary research project, namely PROMETEO, that focused on civil and public protection. As further work we aim to describe the framework as an extension to the Unified Modeling Language (UML).