A novel emergency management platform for smart public safety

Abstract

Summary This paper proposes an efficient architecture of a smart public safety platform that involves public professional operators as well as citizens. The proposed system is compliant with the emerging paradigm of a smart city. Its main features are that of monitoring, forecasting and managing emergency situations, arising from environmental disasters or crimes. The proposed platform performs a smart and functional integration of heterogeneous components as a smart data gathering and analysis system, a novel professional communication system, wireless sensor networks and social networks. Each element acts not only as an information collector but has autonomous capabilities to cooperate with the others in order to increase the system efficiency and to reduce the need of human interactions. Finally, the paper highlights some open research issues that represent critical aspects and require additional investigations in order to further improve the performance of the proposed platform. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.