Original title: Conception et Développement Expérimental d'un Protocole de Gestion d'Urgence Décentralisé
Bachelor of Science HES-SO in Business Information Technology thesis, completed at the Haute école de gestion de Genève (HEG Genève), part of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HES-SO). Awarded the highest grade.
Emergency management is traditionally organized around centralized, hierarchical and vertically structured systems. While well established, this paradigm tends to introduce delays in decision-making and suffers from limited interoperability between individuals, communities and organizations during crises, often at the expense of human lives and resources.
The thesis investigates how a digital, decentralized and community-driven approach could complement existing emergency management practices. It pursues three objectives: first, identifying and defining a theoretical framework aligned with the research question; second, conceptualizing a management protocol that addresses the problems raised by that framework; and third, developing a proof-of-concept application to validate the protocol's core elements experimentally.
The resulting proposal is the Decentralized Emergency Management Protocol (DEMP), an open communication standard structured around Safety Information Systems (SIS), safety zones, entities and devices, which can be grouped into federations to support wide-scale situations. DEMP promotes decentralization to foster self-organization and immediate response.
The protocol is validated through OASIS (Open Alert and Safety Information System), a proof-of-concept implementation relying on the Matrix specification, alongside command-line tools oasis-cli for managing safety zones, entities and devices, and oasis-sim for orchestrating simulated test environments and triggering alert messages across Docker containers running as Safety Information System (SIS) nodes. Simulation results indicate that alerts are triggered as expected in the majority of scenarios, and that the underlying infrastructure meets the target requirements in terms of robustness, security and availability.
The thesis concludes that a decentralized, open and interoperable protocol is a viable foundation for modern emergency management and opens several avenues for further practical contributions, which have since been pursued through many related projects. DEMP will also underpin further academic research.
Centralized authority as a single point of failure, and the lack of interoperability between organizations, communities and individuals in coordination and information sharing during emergencies, resulting in slower and less effective crisis management.
A secure decentralized architecture with collaborative decision-making among stakeholders, and a shared interface for real-time communication across heterogeneous devices, allowing faster response and potentially more effective crisis management.
Since 2024, the work has been extended and published as a series of open source projects:
The full thesis is publicly available in French on SONAR HES-SO, the open-access repository of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland.