CORBA-Based Distributed Geographic Information Systems for Transportation for Emergency Medical Services

Abstract

With the advancement of intelligent transportation systems, current and future emergency medical services systems are and will be characterized by real-time response, specialization, and decentralization. To provide a real-time response of medical services, several components are essential, such as dispatching, routing, emergency facilities, and patient’s medical history. A common object request broker architecture (CORBA)–based geographic information system for a transportation framework is proposed for the dispatching and assignment of medical vehicles for emergency services via wireless communication. The framework combines distributed object computing, geographic information systems for transportation, and transportation models in a single system, which provides flexibility and interoperability among existing medical service systems. The framework uses the concept of distributed systems and capabilities of CORBA to design objects and dynamically update medical facilities’ information to relay up-to-date information to ambulances. A real roadway network is used in the numerical experiments to illustrate dynamic aspects of the proposed system.