The seven main challenges of an early warning system architecture

In this paper, we describe the work on the system architecture that is being developed in the EU FP7 project TRIDEC on "Collaborative, Complex and Critical Decision-Support in Evolving Crises". One of the two decision support use cases in the project deals with Tsunami Early Warning. A modern warning system that follows a system-of-systems approach has to integrate various components and subsystems such as different information sources, services and simulation systems. Furthermore, it has to take into account the distributed and collaborative nature of warning systems. Working on the architecture of such a system, you need to deal with a lot of current computer science and information technology problems as well as state-of-the-art solutions from the areas of Big Data and Human Sensors. In this paper, we present the seven main challenges we needed to solve and describe the necessary design decisions we made to tackle them.