The UrbanFlood Common Information Space for Early Warning Systems

The UrbanFlood Common Information Space for Early Warning Systems

Bartosz Baliś, Marek Kasztelnik, Marian Bubak, Tomasz Bartynski, Tomasz Gubała, Piotr Nowakowski, Jeroen Broekhuijsen

Procedia Computer Science, 42 96--105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2011.04.011

Early Warning Systems (EWS) can play a crucial role in mitigating the effects of natural disasters. Modern EWSs leverage wireless sensors for real-time monitoring of natural phenomena and computing-intensive scientific applications for scenario-based prediction and analysis of sensor data. This paper presents the UrbanFlood Common Information Space (CIS), a framework facilitating the creation, deployment and reliable operation of early warning systems. CIS proposes a reference architecture for EWS and provides services to address problems common to all EWSs as complex software systems: integration of legacy scientific applications, workflow orchestration, allocation of computational resources and robust operation. We demonstrate a flood early warning system created using the CIS technology and discuss the benefits of our approach which include shorter EWS development time, exposing EWS as a set of reusable services, platform independence and extensibility.