Structuring Digital Twins for Disasters Management Based on a Blackboard

Every year, natural disasters cause important losses in terms of human lives and property. For example, unexpected floods and wild fires affecting urban areas are more frequent every day due to climate change. When it happens, most of the physical and service infrastructure in the affected area collapse or is eventually shut down to protect civilians. This negatively impacts on the gathering of information required by first response organizations to count on awareness situation that helps them make decisions. Trying to contribute to reduce the information and communication limitations during natural disaster response processes, this paper proposes the use of digital twin systems that help first responders obtain situation awareness and make better and on-time decisions. The proposed structure of these systems is based on both the blackboard pattern to collect, manage and share information, and a crowdsourcing approach to gather information from civilians.