Collaboration On-the-field: Suggestions and Beyond Andrea Marrella marrella@dis.uniroma1.it Massimo Mecella Alessandro Russo
Presentation Outline Introduction and problem statement The case of the WORKPAD Project Guidelines G1 : Process Design and Task Hierarchy G2 : Geo-View vs. Activity View G3 : Network Infrastructure G4 : Designing a User Interface for Mobile Devices G5 : Health Status as Context Information G6 : Task Assignment Policy Conclusions 2
Introduction Nowadays, mobile devices (e.g., PDA, tablets) are widely used for personal information management (managing calendar, reading e- mails, phone calls etc.) and entertainment In the last years, their use in working environment has been constantly growing : Tracking of postal delivery Tickets management on trains The WORKPAD project (http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~workpad) has investigated the use of mobile devices in supporting emergency operators acting on-the-field, by providing collaborative features, mobile internetworking and geo-collaboration 3
The WORKPAD Project 1 Sept. 2006 31 August 2009 A service-oriented software infrastructure for supporting collaborative work of human operators in emergency/disaster scenarios Fully developed through a User-Centered Design approach: Interviews Scenarios and Task Analysis Evaluation techniques Validated in a realistic setting with real emergency operators Movie of the showcase : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idou2nkhptg 4
The WORKPAD Architecture Developing of some applications to support the task execution Context Editor Applications Multimedia Editor GIS Client Process Models The work of rescue operators is orchestrated by a Process Management System (PMS), hosted on the team leader s device A Task-Handler deployed on each device supports operators in the execution of tasks assigned so far Sensors and External Devices Operator Operator PDA Operator Automatic Services Task Handler Emergency Scenario Mobile Network Operator CMMF Leader Operator ROME4EU Engine CMMF PDA CMMF EDGE/UMTS Emergency Vehicle Satellite Back-end Server(s) at Headquarter 5
Objective of this work Starting from the experience gained, the aim of this work is to identify and discuss challenges, requirements and suggestions that could be useful for researcher and practitioners who are developing mobile systems supporting first responders We present 6 guidelines organized into two broader classes : The first one concerns grasping the users' mental attention onto the system as little as possible because pervasive processes are really challenging and stressing for them The latter class of issues is merely technological and deals with reducing the resource consumptions 6
G1 - Process Design and Task Hierarchy During an initial planning stage, first responders define an Emergency Response Plan (ERP), specifying the set of activities that have to be performed on the field ERPs can be modeled as workflows The workflow model offers a powerful representation of collaborative activities to be performed to reach a common goal When modeling a process, the designer focuses on the control-flow perspective, which determines task relationships and execution order In particular, a graph-oriented process visualization helps inexperienced users in creating and understanding process models However, we identified the need to integrate visual process models with a hierarchical task respresentation 7
G1 - Process Design and Task Hierarchy Representing tasks through a hierarchical tree structure allows to model and manage the complexity of tasks in a cooperative environment High level tasks are decomposed into sub-tasks and can be expressed in terms of goals that are reached when the corresponding task is accomplished The task hierarchy reflects the cognitive user model built in order to face the emergency As the task hierarchy does not contain any ordering constraint, it needs to be complemented by process models 8
G2 : Geo-View vs Activity View An interesting feature that emergency operators require is the geo-awareness of colleagues and affected objects, with the capability to track realtime movements and changes This feature assumes a greater importance if coupled with an overlay dealing with collaboration and process views about tasks to be executed 9
G2 : Geo-View vs Activity View The operator s PDA has an interface allowing to continuously switch among the classical listbased Task Handler Immediate perception of tasks and their positions, by facilitating both the taking in charge of them and the monitoring of efficient executions An interesting challenge concerns the issue of indoor localization of operators and a geo-based Task Handler, in which positions of assigned tasks are shown, together with positions of operators 10
G3 : Network Infrastructure In Emergency Management, it is not feasible to set up any centralized solution for the mantainance of the network connection between operator s device Standard communication infrastructure (e.g., HSDPA, UMTS) may be unavailable due to collapse of transmitters or overloading of network capacity One of the main strenght of the project was the possibility to keep connected the different team members one another without the assistance of fixed communication infrastructure Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) VS Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) 11
Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks A MANET is a self-configuring network of mobile devices connected through wireless links Each device can send packets through the wireless link exploiting its routing table Each device must keep continuously updated the information required to properly route traffic and is free to move in any direction, by changing its link to other devices frequently...but this operation consume a big amount of device s memory, by causing the impossibility to use the device for higher priority computation (e.g., service invocation) 12
Wireless Mesh Networks A WMN is characterized by a backbone composed by several Mesh Routers that are connected with each other by multi-hop router paths A device connected to one of the mesh routers can communicate with others devices connected to other mesh routers Mesh routers can be provided directly by Homeland Security s vehicles Mesh routers perform dedicated routing so as to decrease the network load for mobile devices 13
G4 : Designing a User Interface Activities in emergency scenarios are highlystressing situations for the users acting on the field. A crucial point is to understand how and where address user s mental attention In fact, users must give more priority on the physical stimuli concerning the activities to execute than on those coming for software applications The User Interface (UI) of the system should attract the user s attention only when it is strictly required 14
G4 : Designing a User Interface Organize the information in 3-4 macro categories, without filling the screen with huge set of objects Highly contrasting and easyto-read choice of colors, in order to be clearly visible in particular light condition Since the interaction has to take mostly place through fingers, the UI elements should be sized and spaced out in order to avoid the users to press on wrong elements Use of sonorous alarms and popups to capture the user s attention only when needed The real challenge is the development of fully vocal interfaces 15
G5 : Context Awareness Context Awareness: ability of a system to gather information from the environment and to adapt its behaviour based on this context info Context info includes: infrastructure context: device capabilities and status (CPU, memory, battery level...), network infrastructure (bandwidth, QoS...) system context: process execution status, resource availability, absolute and relative positioning of distributed services domain context: user profiles, resource and user capabilities. physical context: temperature, light conditions, humidity In highly dynamic complex emergency management scenarios: automatically react to contextual changes evaluate effects of context info on process execution (activities, execution paths, task assignment, goals, etc.) use context info for enhancing process execution and coordination 16
Health Status as Context Info Breathing Rate Skin Temperature Firefigher 1 Role: Team Leader GPS: 41.896,12.482 Breath: 20-25 BPM Oxygen Temp Pulse Oxygen Level Heart Rate Blood Pressure GPS and Accelerometer First Responders as source of context info gather, process and monitor psychophysical user parameters Health parameters collected through embedded wearable sensors exploit Personal Area Network (PAN) and Body Area Network (BAN) technologies PDA acts as pre-processing and gateway unit Main challenges and open issues define suitable representation for heterogeneous data process and correlate data to monitor health status detect psychophysical stress conditions and trigger compensation and recovery activities restructure running processes reassign tasks include health parameters in workload evaluation and task assignment 17
G6 : Task Assignment Policy When allocating tasks, tipically PMSs adopt a pull-based approach The system offers each task to one or more user qualified for it Through the Task Handler, a user is able to choose among the offered tasks and to commit to undertake the execution When an operator selects an offered task, it is withdrawn from the list of tasks of other participants Task 1 Task 2 PMS Task 1 Task 1 Task 2 This mechanism is unfeasible in emergency scenarios, since the risk is to have some task(s) waiting indefinitely for being chosen and executed 18
G6 : Task Assignment Policy In emergency scenarios is preferable a push-based approach The system dinamically selects an operator qualified for executing a given task and directly allocates the work-item to the selected operators Task 1 Task allocation should ensure that each operator is assigned no more than one task and that each task is assigned to exactly one operator PMS Task 2 Task 2 According to our experience, the task assignement policy has to be complemented with a prioritybased allocation mechanism Task 4 Task 3 An operator executing a task should not be considered not available for further assignement. The system could assign more tasks to a single operator if their priority is higher than the one under execution 19
Conclusions In this work we have presented a set of suggestions for future research activities and lessons learned to be taken into account when designing mobile applications for first responders supporting their collaboration Identified research challenges : Geo-awareness Vocal interfaces Indoor Localization Health Status as a context information for Emergency Management!!! 20
THANKS FOR THE ATTENTION