A Development and Execution Environment for Early Warning Systems for Natural Disasters

Early Warning Systems (EWS) may become a powerful tool for mitigating the negative impact of natural disasters, especially when combined with advanced IT solutions - such as on-demand scenario simulations, semi-automatic impact assessment, or real-time analysis of measurements from in-situ sensors. However, such complex systems require a proper computing environment supporting their development and operation. We propose the Common Information Space (CIS), a software framework facilitating design, deployment and execution of early warning systems based on real-time monitoring of natural phenomena and computationally intensive, time-critical computations. CIS provides a service-oriented technology stack which helps design 'blueprints' for early warning application scenarios and deploy these blueprints as services - system factories enabling users to rapidly deploy new EWSs in new settings. CIS also provides advanced runtime services and resource orchestration capabilities in order to address the specific requirements of EWSs: continuous operation, highly variable resource demands and mission-critical computations. The CIS concept is validated through the Flood Early Warning System whose goal is to monitor embankments in urban areas and assist in rapid decision making whenever a dike failure results in a flooding threat.