Towards a Collaborative Network Paradigm for Emergency Services

The rate and intensity of large scale disasters, natural and induced by humans via deforestation, carbon emissions, terrorism etc appears to be steadily increasing. At the same time, mankind appears to create increasingly complex systems to sustain its survival, quality of life and evolution. Ensuring that the people and their vital systems survive and cope with the natural disasters require proper preparation, response and recovery. Unfortunately, often the organisations put in place to deliver emergency services operate in a suboptimal way due to a plethora of factors, with a prominent role played by the lack of proper inter-operation and collaboration. This paper proposes the use of Collaborative Networks (CN) concept in Emergency Services from an Enterprise Architecture (EA) perspective so as to take advantage of the wealth of knowledge accumulated in these domains. Following an introduction and a brief review of the state-of-the-art, the paper justifies the adoption of the CN paradigm and demonstrates the use of an EA approach previously tested for the CN domain, in the Emergency Services area.