Keywords

1 Introduction

When gathered inside one room, the partners of a collaboration can directly access large amounts of information [10], enabling them to enhance their collaborative awareness. They can identify common goals, critical partners, or share accurate information.

Because the collaborations tend to extend their geographical reach, they can-not communicate as easily as before. To help them, [19] recommends the use of a common artifact to support cooperative activities that can be both individually conducted and interdependent. The main goal of the artifact is to reduce the complexity of collaborations, including the complexity of their information system due to:

  • The amount of information in our daily lives is continually increasing and is multiplied by existing information systems [11], while our brains can only process a limited amount of complex information;

  • Each partner must be able to access a part of the collaborative awareness adapted to their business and their level of responsibility;

  • Information shared within a collaboration comes from heterogeneous sources, and each has an expiration date before which it must be used.

These three issues are particularly true during a crisis situation where the collaboration aims to respond to every risk and consequences due to the disaster [12, 15, 20]: the crisis cells have to face high information load and high time pressure, within complex communication channels, while the collaboration can easily breakdown due to heterogeneous experiences, information accesses and comprehensions.

To support the partners in managing the information available within the collaboration, we proposed a collaboration support system able to select information according to (i) the on-going collaboration stage and (ii) the level of commitment of the current user, in order to give each user access to a suited Common Operational Picture (COP), supported by a Geographical Information System (GIS).

A COP is, as defined by [16], an operational picture shared by several partners during a particular operation. Its goal is to enable a shared Situation Awareness (SA) within the collaboration. In this case, the term SA can be defined as a model of the environment surrounding the collaboration [9]. This COP can be displayed through the use of a GIS. According to [16], such an information system is a powerful tool to support SA, in particular during crisis situation where almost all relevant information is spatial.

Our goal is to strengthen collaborative awareness in order to enhance the agility of the collaboration (defined in [2]) in the face of new threats or opportunities. The collaboration support system described in this paper includes:

  • A meta-model, as defined by [7], to enable a unified approach of interoperability, and its models modelling the collaborative situation.

  • A GIS that takes the role of a COP to communicate information from the system to the user;

  • An automatic classification by collaboration stages to filter information according to the current phase of the collaboration;

  • An automatic classification by partner roles to filter the information according to the place of the user in the collaboration.

Section 1 presents the collaboration stages and the partners roles classifications that are used to select the information to be displayed on the COP. Section 2 proposes to validate these two classifications by using them in case of a very specific type of collaboration: a crisis collaboration.

2 The Use of a COP to Enhance Collaborative Awareness

The Fig. 1 illustrates how the collaboration support system, proposed in this paper, operates to adapt its COP to is current user and to the current stage of the collaboration. The design of the system involves the definition of a meta-model, several partners’ roles and several collaboration’s stages, that have to be common to every collaboration type:

Fig. 1.
figure 1

A communication diagram, in Unified Modelling Language (UML) that illustrates how each partner of a collaboration can use the COP interface of the collaboration support system to enhance their collaborative awareness

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  • The meta-model (defined in [7]) is used to homogenize and organize available information in models. Such a meta-model, dedicated to collaborations, is described in [3].

  • The role is used to select information, according to the need of the partner, using the collaboration support system.

  • The stage is used to select information over time.

  • The logs are stored to enable future improvements of the collaboration support system.

a. The partners classification to ensure confidentiality

The work of [21], followed by [5], enabled us to identify three partner roles, inspired from the maturity levels of collaborations and described in Table 1. By default, the system does not share information of higher responsibility levels, with lower responsibility levels:

Table 1. The partners classification by partner roles, defined in this paper
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  • A partner P1, with a role R1

  • can reach information shared by a partner P2, with a role R2

  • If only R1  ≥  R2

Furthermore, during an “update()” operation (cf. Fig. 1), a partner can set the default responsibility level of information that he adds to the system. A federated partner can, for example, decide to make its newly added information visible to one, several, or all, open partners (cf. Table 1).

b. The collaboration classification to filter the displayed information

Two previous research works [3, 22] have enabled us to identify five main collaboration stages that are described below in Table 2. Each collaboration stage comes with its own information needs

Table 2. The collaboration classification by stages, defined in this paper
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The Table 3 shows how the concepts of one collaboration meta-model (from [3]) can be classified. For example, the partners of a collaboration need to learn about each other at the beginning of the collaboration during the perception stage (cf. Table 2). Conversely, the goals of the collaboration are set during the convergence stage, when everyone SA is good enough to support this decision.

Table 3. The concepts of the meta-model [3], labelled with the five collaboration stages, according to their level of usefulness
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The classifications are used to identify the “default information” to be first displayed on the COP, for one given user:

  • If a partner needs additional information,

  • the system does not refer to the collaboration classification,

  • but only to the partners classification that manage responsibility levels

To sum up, the pair <collaboration stage, user role> enables the generation of a view of the model, suited to the current collaborative situation, in order to feed the COP displayed by the GIS. The Fig. 2 shows how information is selected according to the need of the user. This follows the recommendations of Mica Endsley [9] about goal-directed task analyses.

Fig. 2.
figure 2

The process enabling the collaboration support system to generate views suited to both the responsibility level of its user and the current collaboration stage

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3 The Case of Crisis Collaboration

In the aftermath of a disaster, a crisis response requires the collaboration of numerous, heterogeneous partners, under high stress and high time pressure [18]. This paper unfolds the scenario of a 100-year flood provided by the ANR GéNéPi project. It allowed for the interview of many practitioners often involved in crisis collaborations. The results, recorded in specifications [17], underlines the issues still faced by practitioners during crisis responses:

  • Much of the information available is unclear, outdated or unreliable, and only the partners with high expertise can get by;

  • The diagnosis of the impacted territory and the analysis of the vulnerable assets at stake remains difficult;

  • Due to the number of partners involved, it is hard to take into account all possibilities of response process, and even harder to find the optimal response process.

The collaboration support system proposed in this paper can support them in dealing with:

  • The issues due to the instability of the crisis, thanks to the COP that display the information contains in a model that can be continuously updated, as in [1];

  • The issues faced during the understanding phase, thanks to the capacity of the COP to enhance collaborative awareness, as underlined by [4, 6];

  • The issues due to information overload thanks to the collaboration and partners classifications, as described in Sect. 1.

In order to enable the collaboration support system, illustrated in Fig. 2, to generate views of crisis situations, the classifications of collaboration stages and partners’ roles dedicated to crisis collaboration still need to be defined.

a. The partners classification adapted to crisis collaboration support

In France, in case of a 100-year flood, the organization involves four different responsibility levels [8]

  • Local level;

  • County level;

  • Zonal level;

  • National level.

The hierarchies in place, corresponding to the crisis partners’ roles, impose a dedicated information management. For example, a prefect (county level), aiming to communicate to the press, needs to know about the number of people without electricity supply in the county. Conversely, the power supplier (local level), aiming to ensure the continuity of their network, needs to know the exact locations of cut points on their network.

b. The collaboration classification adapted to crisis collaboration support

Like the collaboration stages proposed in this paper, several crisis collaboration phases have been defined over time. Among the first to distinct four phases were Rosenthal and Kouzmin [18]: “Crises […] may be considered in terms of circular processes involving mitigation and preparation, response as well as recovery and rehabilitation”. Inside the response phase, a French official document [14] recognizes five more phases:

  • The confirmation of the alert (Ca): “Is there a disaster? What is its scale?”;

  • The alert (Al): “What are the concerned organizations that will take part in the collaboration?”;

  • The characterization of the crisis (Cc): “Where are the assets vulnerable to the consequences of this crisis?”;

  • The evaluation phase (Ev): “Where are the damaged assets? Where are the threatened assets?”;

  • The follow-up phase (F l) that consists of “thoughtful actions” to anticipate long-term consequences.

All the concepts from a meta-model dedicated to collaborative crisis management, as the one described in [3], can be linked to these crisis response phases. The obtained table (an extract is given in Table 4), along with the meta-model from [3], is used by the collaboration support system instead of the Table 2 suited to all kind of collaboration.

Table 4. Some crisis concepts from [13], labelled with the five crisis response phases from [14], according to their usefulness
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Rationally, the links (•) from Table 3, can easily be applied to the crisis concepts of Table 4 because they all inherit from one concept of Table 3. For example, information concerning a new event, useful during the evaluation phase of a crisis, are also useful during the monitoring phase of the collaboration, because an event is considered as a fact.

Thanks to these new crisis collaboration response phases, and new crisis partners’ roles, a collaborative support system, as the one presented in Fig. 2, can select the information to be displayed to its user according to their relevance, and therefore decrease information load of the partners involved in a crisis situation.

4 Conclusion

This paper offers to use a collaboration support system to display relevant information, via a Common Operational Picture (COP) based on a Geographical Information System (GIS) and describing the collaborative situation.

To further limit information overload and to take into account the different responsibility levels involved, the paper proposes two classifications, dedicated to collaborations:

  • The collaboration classification to adapt the COP to the current collaboration stage that is either the perception, the comprehension, the understanding, the convergence or the monitoring stage.

  • The partners classification to adapt the view to the goal of the current user. It consists of three categories: communicating, open or federated partners.

To extend the proposed classifications, we have checked that these solutions, dedicated to collaborations, apply to crisis collaborations: collaboration in highly unstable environment, under high-stress and time pressure.