Enhancing Disaster Management by Taking Advantage of General Public Mobile Devices: Trends and Possible Scenarios

International audienceWhen a crisis occurs, particular infrastructures that are specific to the emergency situation are deployed in order to support rescue operations. Indeed, the normally used ones may have suffered from the disaster resulting in an altered service or may not be available at all. This process concerns physical (logistics) as well as immaterial (information) items delivery. Nowadays, a special emphasize has been put on the latter as it has been proven ([CAM 12], [TAN 09] and [LEF 14]) that it is a major requirement to ensure that the former is realized properly and more generally to address the crisis. Generally, required information aims at answering to the following basic questions: What (happened)? When (did it happened)? Where (is the disaster located)? And possibly How (can it be reached)? That is why research and development works have been led to create technologies that can manage information acquisition and delivery in harsh environments: specific communication networks, rugged equipment, solar-powered devices, etc. Those means are dedicated to risk and emergency experts who are specially trained to evolve under difficult circumstances and the tools they rely on are designed to cope with this context