SOA4DM: Applying an SOA Paradigm to Coordination in Humanitarian Disaster Response

Despite efforts to achieve a sustainable state of control over the management of global crises, disasters are occurring with greater frequency, intensity, and affecting many more people than ever before while the resources to deal with them do not grow apace. As we enter 2015, with continued concerns that mega-crises may become the new normal, we need to develop novel methods to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our management of disasters. Software engineering as a discipline has long had an impact on society beyond its role in the development of software systems. In fact, software engineers have been described as the developers of prototypes for future knowledge workers; tools such as Github and Stack Overflow have demonstrated applications beyond the domain of software engineering. In this paper, we take the potential influence of software engineering one-step further and propose using the software service engineering paradigm as a new approach to managing disasters. Specifically, we show how the underlying principles of service-oriented architectures (SOA) can be applied to the coordination of disaster response operations. We describe key challenges in coordinating disaster response and discuss how an SOA approach can address those challenges.