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. This page provides an English translation of the abstract; the original document was written and defended in French.
Emergency management is traditionally organized around centralized, hierarchical and vertically-structured systems. While well established, this paradigm tends to introduce delays in decision-making, constitutes a single point of failure and suffers from limited interoperability between the many organizations and responders involved.
This 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 both localized and cross-organizational alerting. DEMP promotes decentralization as a way to eliminate single points of failure and encourage self-organization, collaborative decision-making with a flatter hierarchy to allow responders to act faster and more effectively, and a common interface for real-time communication and information sharing to improve interoperability. It also defines mechanisms for authentication, authority and consensus, as well as accessibility.
The protocol is validated through OASIS (Open Alert and Safety Information System), a proof-of-concept implementation relying on 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 Synapse and Nginx instances. Simulation results indicate that the Safety Information System, safety zones, entities and devices behave as intended, that alerts are triggered as expected in the majority of simulated 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 the public DEMP specification and related projects such as SAFE. 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.