A Modeling Approach Supporting Access Control Delegation in a Disaster Management Context

Disaster management can be defined as the organization and management of resources and responsibilities for dealing with all humanitarian aspects of emergencies. This paper is about organizational policies when assigning responsibilities during a flood scenario. Specially, we focus on dynamic access control policies supporting delegation. Delegation is a dynamic behavior involving a user passing his access control authorizations to other users within organizations. This defines one aspect of collaboration at the organizational level. In this paper, we propose to model the delegation access control approach from the flooding business process modeling to its deployment. In doing so, we describe the delegation process, define the access control model, and implement the authorization policies within a disaster management framework.

I. Introduction

Coordination between many highly independent organizations is still a challenging topic in disaster management. Strategic coordination in disaster management means that many highly independent organizations are coordinated towards a common goal within a complex process network ([1]). Different highly independent organizations execute and change their plans frequently, and have to interact in an ad-hoc fashion. These interactions between business processes can hardly be predefined and planned.