Towards a Reference Architecture for Collaborative Decision Support Systems for Natural Disasters Management

Natural disasters (ND) have become increasingly frequent, causing impactful social, economic, and environmental consequences. Civil defenses and related actors are the ones in charge of handling ND throughout their life cycles regarding their different types and intensities. There are plenty of issues that should be considered when facing a ND, including very complex analyses and collaborative decision-making. Studies show an increasing use of decision support systems (DSS) to assist civil defenses in ND. However, it was observed that the numerous DSS for ND cover only isolated parts of the problem, making it difficult to design a complete, scalable, and globally coherent roadmap for civil defenses and software developers. This article proposes a reference architecture aiming at acting as a blueprint for derivation of particular ND DSS. A software prototype has been developed to show a derived DSS based on a civil defense organization. Conclusions and next steps of this work are presented at the end.