BRIDGE · BRIDGE: Bridging resources and agencies in large-scale emergency management

The goal of BRIDGE is to increase safety of citizens by developing technical and organisational solutions that significantly improve crisis and emergency management. The key to this is to ensure interoperability, harmonization and cooperation among stakeholders on the technical and organisational level.Therefor BRIDGE delivers:-Resilient ad-hoc network infrastructures, focussing on the requirements evolving from emergency scenarios-Generic, extensible middleware to support integration of data sources, networks, and systems-Context management system to foster interoperability of data, providing meaningful, reliable informationTechnical interoperability is crucial for improving multi-agency collaboration and continuous training, but its full potential can only unfold, if technology can be integrated and sustained into agency workflows and communication processes. On the level of organisational harmonisation, BRIDGE will provide:-Methods and tools that support run-time intra- and inter-agency collaboration-Model-based automated support system combined with scenario-based training-Agent-based dynamic workflow composition and communication support systemMaking available an increasing amount of data for crisis response systems has to be accompanied with developing intelligent human-computer interaction models to make these data usable. BRIDGE will contribute to this by developing:-Adaptive, multi-modal user interfaces-Novel stationary and mobile interaction techniques-Approaches on how to raise awareness through visualization of ad-hoc networksBRIDGE is committed to an iterative user-centred approach incorporating and validating user and domain requirements.The consortium consists of a well-balanced mix of cross-disciplinary academics, technology developers, domain experts and end-user representatives. Furthermore, the establishment of a User Advisory Board will guarantee active end-user involvement during the whole project