μHandS: Architecture for Ubiquitous Help and Safety Services in Emergencies

M. Imran Sarwar, Imran Sarwar, Asif Mufti**, Waqar Mahmood Al-Khawarizmi Institute of Computer Science

University of Engineering & Technology Lahore, Pakistan

mimran.sarwar, imran.sarwar, director@kics.edu.pk, ** anmufti@yahoo.com

Abstract — Pakistan currently does not possesses any state of the art centralized command and control system which can dispense assistance to its citizen in times of emergencies with optimum efficiency. In addition, there is a lack ofcollaboration among participating organization due bureaucracy and technological limitation. The government as well as the law enforcement agencies realizes that there is a fundamental need to provide its citizens with an emergency management system which will allow them to access timely assistance from the law enforcement agencies in the times of emergencies. We propose a solution that leverages existing GSM infrastructure and does not require citizen to purchase any new hardware to access emergency services. The system that is currently under development will assist in identifying the location where emergency assistance is required. The system allows for increased safety and timely help for the citizens. The system will record and archive data that can be used in identifying movement of the emergency teams in real-time and generate reports of their performance based on the information collected through their mobile phones. Service oriented architecture and use of semantic web technologies is making it easy to collaborate, interoperate, and reuse the existing services among multiple departments. We have used the combination of the state of the art SOA, Semantic web and ICT technologies to build the architecture for the ubiquitous emergency management system.

Emergency management systems, Service oriented architecture, semantic web, interoperability, architecture, framework, ICT

I. INTRODUCTION

Pakistan’s geo physical and security situation demands the need of a radically improved emergency management system that requires minimal time to implement and leverages for the most part on existing infrastructure. In recent years natural disasters and terrorist attacks in our country have intensified the need for advances in the emergency response systems. Today multiple governmental, non-governmental and volunteer organizations participate in handling emergency situations. These organizations need efficient and effective tools and techniques to collaborate with each other to minimize the risks and improve performance of the emergency management system. Emergency management is a multidisciplinary and multi-organizational discipline that involves resources such as

trained human resources, available technology, funds and equipment to achieve expected results from proactive measures. In recent years, Government have taken extensive measures to computerize its processes and workflows, resulting in availability of easier access to various services to its citizens. This has resulted in increased citizen-government interaction and contribution in government decision making processes. Use of service-oriented architecture is gaining momentum as an effective tool for enabling distributed application, integration and reuse not only within a single organization but also help in collaboration among multiple organizations. Governments need to provide services which facilitate multi-organizational collaborations that assists its citizens during the emergency situations. As various government departments are involved in handling emergencies, there is a dire need to develop a framework that uses services-based information and communication technologies to bind inter and intra departmental workflows (processes) of the involved departments. The use of service oriented architecture allows ease of integration and reuse of software components in large scale and multidisciplinary organizations by handling critical interoperability issue like information sharing, security, collaboration management, reliability, etc. Moreover these services should be available to the citizens in ubiquitous manner. The number of mobile phone users in Pakistan has increased dramatically in the recent years, especially for the voice and messaging services. The mobile internet usage is also gaining popularity in Pakistan and this technology is rapidly evolving towards ever more sophistication in hardware and software while at the same time reducing in price. Some people have mobile handsets that can provide extensive functionality whilst others may have basic functionality supported in their mobile phones. The use of mobile phones in emergency situations can help exceptionally enhance the performance of the emergency system. The main advantage of mobile phone usage in emergencies is that we can use it from anywhere in time and place i.e., home, office, shopping mall and even on the go. Most emergencies require urgent intervention to prevent the situation from worsening and this can be achieved by using mobile phone

2011 Fifth FTRA International Conference on Multimedia and Ubiquitous Engineering

978-0-7695-4470-0/11 $26.00 © 2011 IEEE

DOI 10.1109/MUE.2011.26

84

since today majority of the population possess mobile phones and keep it with them at all time.

In this paper, we will discuss our services based architecture for an emergency response, command and control system that will enable the citizens in getting timely help and provide the command and control infrastructure to the departments involved in the emergency situations for optimum dispensing of such critical services. In section 2, we will briefly present literature survey of semantic web and service oriented architecture. The use of SOA and Semantic web based emergency and disaster management systems is also discussed in this section. Section 3 describes the proposed architecture. The challenges to develop interoperable command and control applications for emergencies are discussed in section 4. Section 5 contains the conclusion and some future work.

II. LITRATURE REVIEW

Future ubiquitous government (μ-Government) systems need to provide services which facilitate complex transactions (collaborations) involving intra-departmental and interdepartmental workflows. These workflows not only require seamless communication and interaction among different departments but also ensure a component based design of services [4, 5, 6, 9]. As many government departments are involved in handling emergencies there is a need to develop a framework that uses services-based information and communication technologies to bind inter and intra departmental workflows of the participating department. Previously a collaborative framework for the development of e-Government based emergency system has been proposed to help in identifying the fundamental principles and techniques for a novel approach to emergency management system [13]. This framework aims at designing a system inspired by the biomedical endocrine system (BES) to allow emergency respondents to dynamically assign tasks to different departmental units without a central command center. The framework also points out the need to responding autonomously to the changes in the emergency environment. But this framework is not based on the service oriented architecture and does not provide the ubiquitous command and control approach. This framework mainly focuses on the collaboration among different departmental units involved in emergency handling which is one of the most important requirements in present e-Government emergency system to work efficiently and consistently. We believe the use of semantics and SOA based approach can greatly enhance the performance and scalability of this system. The most important thing during emergency situations is the collaboration and interaction among the various departments involved to prevent and handle the emergency situation.There exists no perfect framework which facilitates the needed interaction among these departments. This suggests an urgent requirement for an adaptable emergency system that will enhance the collaboration between the resources and personnel available from multiple departments and agencies. A study has been conducted to develop an all-round emergency management system with the focus to provide and facilitate easy interaction between the departments to

handle emergency situations [12]. The study mainly focuses on the emergencies occurred in university campuses and is not applicable to the wider domains outside the universities.

Furthermore, if we can understand the emergency situation we can provide a plan that can effectively handle the emergency. This means understanding the context of the emergency is important as it can enhance the performance and appropriateness of the emergency service providing systems. Context can be used to identify the needed services, decisions as to which departments to involve, required personnel in skills and number as well as available resources. The operational processes can be optimized for maximum benefit if the situation is correctly understood. The use of context awareness in computing the severity and priority of the occurred incidents can enhance the performance of the overall emergency system. Context aware computing can be used in the decision making process to compute the severity of the incidents through the emergency request calls from multiple communication channels. The performance of the emergency management systems can be improved with a context aware approach which will play its important role in highly dynamic environments [7]. Similarity between multiple requests can be detected by integrating data captured from multiple channels, which will impose other challenges of performance, security and reliability. As many departments are involved in handling emergencies and we have noticed that each organization has its own vocabulary and terms used in their day to day office environments.When we have created a knowledge base of already occurred emergencies, we will be able to extract key information for decision making and the results from the plans used to handle those emergencies. Semantic web technologies can be used to accomplish this task. When multiple departments are involved we can use the semantics for achieving interoperability in the involved departments. Interoperability in three dimension is required when we want multiple departments to collaborate with each other i.e., organizational interoperability, semantic interoperability and technical interoperability [2].

The key to the next-generation state of the art Digital Governmental applications will be web services working in collaboration with other web services [10, 11]. These collaborative services may probably be based on the semantics of the information that they deliver [16]. We can use semantics to represent the information in the emergency management systems that will help us in the future to retrieve relevant information in emergency situations for knowledge based optimal response [15]. Ontologies can be constructed that make information extraction easy and autonomous. Ontologies are being used in emergency decision support systems [14]. Cross organizational collaborations need sharing of common knowledge among the participating organizations which can be facilitated by the use of Ontology to understand a common meaning in a unitary sense of the crisis concepts and management in these organizations [16]. A framework for semantic interoperability in health sector is proposed in [1]. Many people have used ontologies for emergency management systems but their practical implementation is missing. μ-

85

Government applications will use these services by composing or integrating those together [8]. These systems can be analyzed and enhanced to meet the requirements of novel approaches to the emergency management systems.

III. PROPOSED SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

The above objectives can be achieved by using modern information and communication technologies (ICT). The recent advances in the emergency management systems have shown interest in service oriented architectures, use of ontology and availability of these services in a ubiquitous manner. When an emergency scenario occurs, different organizations collaborate in different strengths and multiple processes need to follow in different organizations. An effective ontology is important for establishing common grounds for the collaboration of services offered by multiple organizations. We propose an architecture for ubiquitous command and control system using service oriented dynamic workflows coordination based on ontology engineering. Service oriented architecture will make collaboration among multiple organizations easy, efficient and straightforward. The use of ontology will enhance the identification of involved services and workflows. Once the exact order of services is identified and workflows are generated for a scenario, the system will use ubiquitous technologies to engage different stakeholders to inform and participate in the rescue activities. SOA is chosen as this will allow loose coupling between the participating organizational services, which make the overall system very flexible. Furthermore, services can be easily added and removed from the existing system. Ontology can be used to automate the generation of workflows based on a given scenario. The system will also use the semantics for knowledge representations and vocabulary exchange between multiple organizations. Also the dispatched personnel can coordinate with each other and can send information to the control center for real time adjustment in the work plan in a ubiquitous manner.

Figure 1. Layers of System Architecture

The ubiquitous availability of the government services to citizens can drastically reduce the time to inform the emergency service provider management agencies and help them in monitoring the performance of the emergency response teams. We are interested in developing an IT infrastructure that uses same mobile technologies that are currently deployed in our environment to help people in emergency situations. In addition, we also want to automate governmental organizations and departments to deploy their e-services that can help citizens in emergency situations. We have proposed an SOA based emergency management system that depends on the semantic technologies and the SOA infrastructure.

The architecture flow shown in figure 2 is illustrated here, from the GSM network the request will be forwarded to uHandS Data Server. uHandS Data Server consists of different modules. These modules have their own service oriented architecture and are responsible for the assigned tasks. Following are the basic components of uHandS Data Centre, along with their functionalities.

A. Emergency request interceptor Emergency Request Interceptor (ERI) is the main listener

and starting point where the user request is received and then the interceptor initiates the system for further functionality.

B. Central Control Engine uHandS control engine is the controller of the whole

system which decides the type and nature of the request and passes it on to the relevant module for the best treatment.

C. Location Service: The location service will be a service that will be used by

the uHandS Server and other e-Government services to calculate the location of the users and field staff.

This service has two main components: 1) Location Calculator

Location calculator is a service responsible for calculating the exact location of the victim/witness based on the received parameters. It uses various sub modules for this

Figure 2. High level system architecture

86

purpose i.e. geo-mapping module or the network location services. It may include Google latitude service or Google maps.

2) Geo-Mapping Geo-Mapping module gathers all the required data from

the location calculator and maps them on the digitized maps in a viewable and understandable format, then returns this finalized map to the location calculator for the further (human) use. Geo-Mapping can use various techniques for this purpose i.e. Google maps or latitude or other map and location based services. This geo mapping will help us in locating the witness/victim, field staff and the jurisdiction on the map.

We have used Google maps for identifying the incident locations and the staff positions. The use of maps to present the incident location with the directions can help in reaching to destinations timely and reduces the risks of loss to the needy people. The digital jurisdictions are marked on the map and staff movements are captured during the duty hours to gauge their performance on a particular task.

D. Action Planner Action Planner comes into action when all the required

information is gathered in the final form and the decision has to be made by e-government service is called next to take appropriate steps to address the emergency.

The basic performance metric of any emergency management system (EMS) is the efficiency of call processing. It for the most part dependent on the communication and computing technologies involved to call handling process. As we know, many heterogeneous sources are involved in EMS, so in order to have maximum benefits we need to find or refine the processes in ways that can speed up sub processes of an EMS e.g. prevention and preparedness. Also motion of the duty staff towards the assigned emergency as a function of time can be used as a basic metric to monitor the performance of the emergency teams. These metrics can effectively define the quality of the service and methods to improve such services. For example

slow response time may imply the transportation is inadequate or human resources are in adequate.

In the public sector, Government of Pakistan has taken various initiatives to increase collaboration between government agencies and non-governmental organizations in order to provide better public services to citizens using information and communication technologies (ICT). Due to the varied nature of different services provided by different governmental departments, there is a immediate need to build a distributed, inter-operable, secure, and trustable digital government infrastructure based on service oriented computing.

We have used semantic web ontology for interoperability between the involved departments. Figure 4 shows the use of static domain ontology to construct dynamic composite ontology based on the dynamic workflow generated to handle the emergency situation at hand.

Figure 4. Use of domain and composite ontology

IV. CHALLENGES

Due to the diverse nature of activities and disparate requirements of the domains of public sector departments, the integration of ICT infrastructures of different departments into proposed services-oriented emergency command and control system will not be a simple task. Some reasons for this include:

(a) Interoperability between multiple departments (research domain)

(b) Efficiently and accurately determining the location of the victims of emergency situations (research domain)

(c) The public sector has various rules and regulations (especially police regulations, jurisdiction), which need to be followed before making some decisions

(d) Sometimes the records held by governmental departments is confidential and it is not readily accessible.

(e) There are various other factors, which need to be resolved within the government departments, some of them are: i. interdepartmental issues

Figure 5. Incidents and jurisdictions marked on Google maps

87

ii. changing governmental processes/workflows iii. training of employees

(f) Emergency service provider may not be prepared to share their data/information with others e.g. due to legal reasons or perhaps lack of process in place or it is unprecedented and data cannot be viewed or made accessible to unauthorized people

(g) People may resist to change in their existing workflows (like use of computers/mobiles instead of paper work)

To overcome these challenges we need to increase the literacy level in law enforcement teams to help them using modern ICT to handle emergencies.

V. CONCLUSION & FUTURE WORK

The citizens will be provided with an emergency management system which will help them in accessing law enforcement agencies or other service agency in the times of emergencies in a ubiquitous manner. This will help in increased safety and timely help of the citizens and fundamentally improve the living standard of Pakistan citizen. The system will record data that can be used to identify the movement of the emergency teams and can prepare reports of their performance based on the properties collected through their mobile phones. The system will help to improve the overall performance of the emergency departments.

Currently we have involved the emergency department and deployed our system in the government emergency department. Other departments will be added to the systems and it will be enhanced based on the requirements and processes of the governmental departments in future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This project is partially funded by Higher Education Commission of Pakistan under National Research Programme for Universities grant no. 20-1692/R&D/093012. The authors would like to thank Dr. Asif Mufti, Muzamil A. Khan, Wasif Tanveer, and Umar Akram for their valuable comments and suggestions, their efforts for hosting this research and making data, software and hardware available for this research.

REFERENCES

[1] Diego M. Lopez∗, Bernd G.M.E. Blobel. “A development framework for semantically interoperable health information systems,” international journal of medical informatics 78 (2009) 83–103

[2] Sarantis D., Charalabidis Y., Psarras J. “Towards Standardising Interoperability Levels for Information Systems of Public Administrations,” eJETA 2008 Special Issue on “Interoperability for Enterprises and Administrations Worldwide”

[3] S. El-Masri. “Mobile Comprehensive Emergency System using Mobile Web Services,” The second international conference on innovative information technology, Dubai UAE, December 26-28, 2005.

[4] Hanid R. Motahari Nezhad, Halvard Skogsrud, and Boualem Benatallh, Fabio Casati. “Securing Service-Based Interaction: Issues and Directions,” IEEE Distributed Systems Online, March 2005.

[5] Brahim Medjahed, Abdelmounaam Rezgui, Athman Bouguettaya, Mourad Ouzzani, "Infrastructure for E-Government Web Services," IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 58-65, Jan./Feb. 2003, doi:10.1109/MIC.2003.1167340

[6] Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh, "Service-Oriented Computing: Key Concepts and Principles," IEEE Internet Computing,vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 75-81, Jan./Feb. 2005, doi:10.1109/MIC.2005.21

[7] Rajalakshmi Bhavanishankar, Chandrasekaran Subramaniam, MageshKumar, and Dipesh Dugar. 2009. A context aware approach to emergency management systems. In Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing: Connecting the World Wirelessly (IWCMC '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1350-1354. DOI=10.1145/1582379.1582675 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1582379.1582675

[8] Brahim Medjahed, Athman Bouguettaya, "A Multilevel Composability Model for Semantic Web Services," IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, vol. 17, no. 7, pp. 954-968, July 2005, doi:10.1109/TKDE.2005.101

[9] In-Young Ko; Neches, R.; , "Composing Web services for large-scale tasks," Internet Computing, IEEE , vol.7, no.5, pp. 52- 59, Sept.-Oct. 2003, doi: 10.1109/MIC.2003.1232518

[10] Ciro D'Urso, "Toward a Cooperative Architecture for Delivering Government Services, Part 1," IT Professional, vol. 5, no. 6, pp. 64, 61-63, Nov./Dec. 2003, doi:10.1109/MITP.2003.10003

[11] Ciro D'Urso, "Toward a Cooperative Architecture for Delivering Government Services, Part 2," IT Professional, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 64, 61-63, Jan./Feb. 2004, doi:10.1109/MITP.2004.1265549

[12] Yang Qing; Wang Zhan; , "All-Round Emergency Management of Public Incidents," Services Science, Management and Engineering, 2009. SSME '09. IITA International Conference on , vol., no., pp.522-525, 11-12 July 2009, doi: 10.1109/SSME.2009.114

[13] Juling Ding; Zhongjian Le; Ping Zhou; , "A Collaborative Framework for Developing E-Government Emergency System," Management of e-Commerce and e-Government, 2008. ICMECG '08. International Conference on , vol., no., pp.128-131, 17-19 Oct. 2008 doi: 10.1109/ICMECG.2008.35

[14] Kai Yu, Qingquan Wang and Lili Rong; , "Emergency Ontology construction in emergency decision support system," Service Operations and Logistics, and Informatics, 2008. IEEE/SOLI 2008. IEEE International Conference on , vol.1, no., pp.801-805, 12-15 Oct. 2008.

[15] Ruzhi Xu; Xiaoliang Dai; Feng Yang; Peiguang Lin; , "Emergency Preplan Knowledge Representation and Semantic Retrieval System Based on Ontology," Management of e-Commerce and e-Government, 2009. ICMECG '09. International Conference on , vol., no., pp.124-127, 16-19 Sept. 2009, doi: 10.1109/ICMeCG.2009.130

[16] Xiang Li; Gang Liu; Anhong Ling; Jian Zhan; Ning An; Lian Li; Yongzhong Sha; , "Building a Practical Ontology for Emergency Response Systems," Computer Science and Software Engineering, 2008 International Conference on , vol.4, no., pp.222-225, 12-14Dec. 2008, doi: 10.1109/CSSE.2008.1044

[17] Sofie Pilemalm, Niklas Hallberg. “Exploring Service-Oriented C2

Support for Emergency Response for Local Communities,” In Proceedings of 5th International ISCRAM Conference, 2008.

[18] Magnus Ingmarsson, Henrik Eriksson, Niklas Hallberg. “Exploring Development of Service-Oriented C2 System for Emergency Response,” In Proceedings of 6th International ISCRAM Conference,May 2009.

88