Design Considerations for an Accident Management System

Effective accident management requires the organization of large amounts of information. This information consists of reference information which rarely changes during an accident and decision support information which changes very rapidly. Much of the rapidly changing information is a result of collaboration between accident response personnel. In this paper we discuss accident management systems as instances of cooperative information systems and describe three designs of an accident management system called FRIEND developed at Carnegie Mellon University. We concentrate on how each design handles the rapidly changing information with different notification mechanisms to support the collaboration between end users. We identify two specific types of architectures, distributed state and stateless, and conclude with a general discussion of architectures supporting cooperative information systems.