In order to enhance interoperability and productivity in the develop-ment of situation-aware applications for disaster management, proper mecha-nisms and guidelines are required. They must address the lack of semantics in modelling emergency situations. In addition, the ever-changing and unpredicta-ble nature of disaster scenarios present challenges for information processing and collaboration. This paper proposes a framework that combines the follow-ing elements: (i) a foundational ontology for temporal conceptualization; (ii) well-founded specifications of structural and behavioral models; (iii) a CEP en-gine based on a distributed rule-based platform for situation management; (iv) a model-driven approach. We illustrate the operation of the framework with a scenario for monitoring tuberculosis epidemy.

1. 17/06/2015 1
Developing Situation-Aware Applications for Disaster
Management with a Distributed Rule-Based Platform
João Moreira1, Luís Ferreira Pires1, Marten van Sinderen1, Patrícia Dockhorn Costa2
1 Services, Cyber-security and Safety group (SCS), University of Twente, Netherlands.
{j.luizrebelomoreira,l.ferreirapires,m.j.vansinderen}@utwente.nl
2 Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES), Brazil. pdcosta@inf.ufes.br
The 9th International Web Rule Symposium (RuleML)
August 2-5, 2015
Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

2. Motivation
Challenges:
Develop SA applications, considering:
 How to characterize situations and response actions
 How to manage and collaborate the detected situations among
SA applications
 How to handle situations not specified at design-time
17/06/2015 2
Situation-aware (SA) applications try to detect situations and react
to them, being particularly useful to support disaster management
 Meteorological forecasting
 Victims’ dead reckoning
 Power plants operation
 Traffic control
 (etc)

3. Our solution: Framework
17/06/2015 3
Unforeseen
Situation Handler
Application A
Context Model
(OntoUML)
Specification Implementation
(Design-time)
(Runtime)
Situation Model
(SML)
Action Model
(BPMN)
Context
Model
(Java)
Business
Process Model
(BPM Suite)
Situation
Types
Situation
RulesLHS
RHS
Methodology
(MDE)
Situation Service
(SiNoS broker)
working memory A
rule
set A
rule
engine A
Application B
working memory B
rule
set B
rule
engine B
Application C
shared
WM
Application D
Application E
Application F
CEP engine
(SCENE/Drools)
+ +
Conceptual: Foundational Ontology (UFO)