Overseer: A Mobile Context-Aware Collaboration and Task Management System for Disaster Response

Abstract

Efficient collaboration and task management is challenging in distributed, dynamically-formed organizations such as ad hoc disaster response teams. Ineffective collaboration may result in poor performance and loss of life. In this paper, we present Overseer, an open multi-agent system that leverages context information in a mobile setting to facilitate collaboration and task allocation. We describe our system architecture, deployment, evaluation metrics, challenges and proposed solutions. We also show how mobile context can be used to create dynamic role-based assignments to support collaboration and effective task management.