EMERGENCY SERVICES IN SMART CITIES: THE PROBLEM OF ACTIVATING MOBILE UNITS

Abstract

Smart cities seek to improve the quality of life of citizens with the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Efforts have been undertaken to build computer systems that address the big problems of cities. An important city service is the emergency service call (e.g., police and hospitals), which demands the moving of mobile units. The problem is to perform the activation of the mobile units which are the most appropriate ones to act in a particular situation by considering, amongst other factors, the time to reach the emergency site. A middleware can be used in this context to support the activation of mobile units by managing the notification of events related to emergencies. Several event-based middleware were analyzed regarding their suitability for the activation of the most suitable mobile units to act in emergencies in Smart Cities. However, they showed little flexibility with respect to event notification only to the most suitable mobile units. Thus, this paper presents and formalizes the problem of activating mobile units, as well as a corresponding solution, evaluates event-based middleware and proposes a more suitable event-based middleware to support emergency services in Smart Cities presenting the implementation of one of the proposed approaches.