DiNAR: health monitoring of IT systems in emergency response

Disaster management and emergency response mechanisms have come of age post 9/11. Undoubtedly the introduction of Information Technology (IT) in emergency response management has been revolutionary from the perspective of better management of the emergency response. However, the various components which make up the IT infrastructure, such as sensors, computers, PDAs, network devices, etc, are inherently volatile in nature. To overcome this volatility and increasing the robustness of the emergency system we designed and developed a health monitoring tool, denoted DiNAR, for disaster systems. This tool will help the incident commander to actively monitor the state of the IT infrastructure which has been deployed in the field as well as the applications running at remote sites. DiNAR uses Manager-Agent based architecture and a novel agent initiated message exchange.