DBISexperience - Notfallmanagement für Wasserinfrastrukturen

Process-aware, Cooperative Emergency Management for Water Infrastructures

Report about the use of the AristaFlow BPM Suite from the Institute of Numerical Methods and Informatics in Civil Engineering, TU Darmstadt

Project
Huge floods at the rivers Elbe and Oder in 2002 caused high damage of property in Germany (about 11 billion Euros) and affected great parts of the population. Experiences in the past have shown that preventive flood protection measures are crucial for the mitigation of damages. However, a 100% protection against floods will never be possible. Therefore it is of great importance to install an efficient, reactive and coordinated emergency management for flood response. However, this poses high requirements to all involved organizations since since collaboration among them can hardly be trained for these extreme situations. In particular, flood response managers have to cope with time-pressure and incomplete information about the current disaster situation.

Our project aims to improve and to support emergency management for flood response through new IT methods. In this context procedures and courses of actions in flood response are analyzed. The results are structured and mapped to formal process models. These process models are associated with geographical information (webGIS) and an operational picture (predicted water levels and predicted inundated areas) using the process management system AristaFlow BPM Suite. On the basis of an organizational model, the activities of the process models are assigned to responsible responders from different organizations. The AristaFlow process management system itself represents the component which manages and controls the procedures and tasks during the flood event as well as the information flow. Thus, it supports the responders in planning and executing flood response operations.

Why have we applied the AristaFlow BPM Suite in our project?

  1. The AristaFlow process template editor allows correctness checks for both data and control flow during modeling time and offers excellent graphical support for the construction of process models for flood response.
  2. AristaFlow offers sophisticated support for connecting process models with external components (e.g., web services and databases) through pre-built and customizable activity templates.
  3. Individual templates for specific process activities can be implemented to a great extent using existing programming interfaces (i.e., the AristaFlow API).

Application examples of AristaFlow

In the following a few examples are given which show how we have applied AristaFlow in our project.
In flood response, a coordinated, situation-related management of resources (machines, vehicles, equipment) is of great importance. Besides technical information of resources, also organizational, geographical and temporal aspects have to be considered for resource requests and resource allocations. In one process model which was developed to represent the procedures of the resource management, data is retrieved out of a relational database using complex queries.
Furthermore, individual activity templates have been developed to generate user forms for resource information and the selection of resources.
Another activity template allows the access of a developed application offering geographical information (depot locations, predicted inundated areas, routes etc.) on a digital map (web-mapping).
Moreover, one of the activity template we developed offers the possibility to send dynamically generated audio messages, which are derived out of process data elements, to phones.
Other examples concern pre-planned protection measures (e.g. cordon of endangered areas), which will be triggered if a certain forecasted water level is reached. The data of water level sensors is automatically submitted and provided via web services. The connection to these web services is well supported by AristaFlow, i.e., respective data can be easily integrated in the data flow of the processes.

Publications

Wagenknecht, Armin; Rüppel, Uwe: Improving Resource Management In Flood Response With Process Models and Web GIS. In: Proceedings of the 16th TIEMS Annual Conference 2009, International Emergency Management Society, Istanbul, Turkey, June 2009 (accepted).

Rüppel, U.; Wagenknecht, A.: Towards a Process-Driven Emergency Management System for Municipalities. In: Proc. of the 12th Int. Conf. on Computing in Civil and Building Engineering & 2008 Int. Conf. on Information Technology in Construction, Peking, China, Okt 2008.

Rüppel, U.; Wagenknecht, A.: Improving Emergency Management by Formal Dynamic Process-Modelling. In: Proc. of the 24th Conf. on Information Technology in Construction, S. 559-564, Maribor, Slowenien, Juli 2007

DBISexperience, DBIS experience, processes for a flexible world

In a Nutshell

Problem

  • Coordination of resources  in the context of flood disasters
  • High number of resources from different organizations
  • No full integration of hetergeneous information possible
     

Solution enabled by AristaFlow

  • Ensuring correctness of process models at any point in time
  • Simple integration of web services and external application components based on AristaFlow activity templates

Partners

Institute of Numerical Methods and Informatics in Civil Engineering TU Darmstadt

Project staff
Dipl.-Wirtsch.-Ing. Armin Wagenknecht
wagenknecht(at)iib.tu-darmstadt.de

Project Management
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Uwe Rüppel
rueppel(at)iib.tu-darmstadt.de

 

AristaFlow GmbH
info(at)aristaflow.com
www.aristaflow.com
+49 731 98588-600

 

Contact

University of Ulm
Institute of Databases and Information Systems

Prof. Dr. Peter Dadam

Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert