Architecture challenges for a crowd-based emergency management system

Today's emergency management systems for large-scale events or industrial parks still fail to t exploit the power of crowd-based information collection, smart mobile devices, efficient multimedia analysis, and visualization techniques. It is important to examine the optimal usage of these to significantly improve the responses. In the context of the RESCUER project [1], we developed a system architecture for such a system. The system is being developed in a highly distributed setting of nine partners spread across the EU and Brazil. Failing to identify the key architectural challenges or identifying them at a very late stage of the project causes a lot of cost and effort. From this project we have identified a set of key architectural challenges from very different points of view, e.g., technical, functional, project settings, etc. Our experiences will greatly benefit other organizations engaged in initiatives in these kinds of systems. They will save valuable time and effort by discovering problems at a very early stage in the project.