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The Analysis of Coordination in an Information System Application – Emergency Medical Services

  • Conference paper
Agent-Oriented Information Systems II (AOIS 2004)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 3508))

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Abstract

There is an inevitable need for collaboration and coordination among response organizations during the occurrences of emergencies. We attack the coordination problem by analyzing intelligent agents’ organizational behaviours and exploring a set of coordination mechanisms. This paper studies the application of our coordination research to a small-scale Emergency Medical Services (EMS) information system with response agencies modeled as organizations of autonomous agents. Due to the excessive amount of information and the dynamic change in the environment, the information decision process has become the backbone of EMS. The significance of our extended set of GPGP coordination mechanisms is examined under various environmental settings in this application domain. This paper models the coordination among three organizations during emergency responses to a set of small scale, concurrent incidents, like ambulance calls, police calls and mixed calls with potential needs of transporting the emergency victims to appropriate medical facilities. An EMS agent framework is implemented, an integrated coordination algorithm is introduced, early experimental results are presented and finally appropriate decisions are suggested for the response organizations. This paper also briefly discusses the extension for the management of emergency incidents to larger scale disasters.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer & Information Sciences, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, 19716, USA

    Wei Chen & Keith S. Decker

Authors
  1. Wei Chen
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  2. Keith S. Decker
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. DG Information Society and Media, Unit D3: Software Technologies, European Commission, Avenue de Beaulieu 29, level 4, office 49, 1049, Brussels, Belgium

    Paolo Bresciani

  2. DISI, University of Trento, 38100, Povo, Trento, Italy

    Paolo Giorgini

  3. Faculty of Information Technology, University of Technology, Sydney, 2000, Broadway, NSW, Australia

    Brian Henderson-Sellers

  4. School of Information Management and Technology Management, University of New South Wales, Australia

    Graham Low

  5. Higher Education Development Centre, University of Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Michael Winikoff

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Chen, W., Decker, K.S. (2005). The Analysis of Coordination in an Information System Application – Emergency Medical Services. In: Bresciani, P., Giorgini, P., Henderson-Sellers, B., Low, G., Winikoff, M. (eds) Agent-Oriented Information Systems II. AOIS 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3508. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11426714_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11426714_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-25911-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31946-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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