A Layered Software Architecture for the Development of Smart Mobile Distributed Systems Oriented to the Management of Emergency Cases

Smart mobile distributed systems (SMDSs) oriented to managing emergency cases (ECs) have become a helpful support tool in case of earthquakes at government and higher education institutions (GHEIs). This fact has motivated various works to propose SMDSs that are focused on managing ECs; however, many fail to address all essential requirements for effective managing and streamlining of the activities that must be carried out before, during, and after an earthquake occurs at GHEIs, resulting in suboptimal design decisions. In addition, none of these works proposes a reference software architecture that guides the development of these systems. That has given rise to issues, such as lack of standardization and low quality of the developed systems. This work presents a software architecture to develop SMDSs focused on managing the activities of people and members of the brigades in case of earthquakes at GHEIs. The proposed software architecture was evaluated based on four main aspects: correctness and coverage of desirable requirements, functional suitability, usability assessment, and validation and verification of the reference architecture elements. The results show that our software architecture provides suitable architectural support for developing SMDSs oriented to managing ECs, which meets the needed requirements.