Design patterns for emergency management: An exercise in reflective practice

The design of a decision support system (DSS) for emergency management is an important and recurrent task in several application domains. However, despite several approaches and systems are reported in the literature, reusing such experiences is not easy. Starting from the experience gained through three concrete projects carried out by the authors in the last 10 years, in this paper, we suggest an approach based on design patterns, which can be used for the conceptual design of DSSs for emergency management. The validity of the proposed collection of design patterns has been assessed through an evaluation exercise with expert designers.