A mobile architecture with dynamic message filtering for emergency response environments

Bill Karakostas

doi:10.1186/2192-1121-2-2

Bill Karakostas

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https://doi.org/10.1186/2192-1121-2-2

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This paper demonstrates that contemporary smartphones act as effective message filtering systems in high traffic environments such as emergency response organisations, without relying on central servers. We have prototyped a mobile messaging application for Android smartphones in the Erlang language. We implemented filtering rules based on message origin, importance, and temporal validity, and tested the filtering capabilities of a smartphone in a realistic setup, that simulates traffic of tens of thousands of messages per minute, as in a large scale emergency response operation. The conclusion is that careful coding of the messaging application so that it operates in constant memory space and judicious use of the available display area can provide an effective portable message filtering for real-time, high-volume traffic, and the potential to reduce information overload for the emergency responder.

Highlights

It is argued that the chief challenge for the emergency response organisation is not the scarcity of information, but its excess: too much information can strain the capacity of both the infrastructure and of the decision making functions of the organisation [1]
The research question addressed by this paper is whether instant messaging technologies on mobile devices can be an effective means to filter in real-time through the large number of message exchanges amongst the members of an emergency response organisation
We model the background communication message flow as a random uniform distribution where the number of inter-team messages transmitted by the network grows linear with the size of the emergency response organisation

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Introduction

It is argued that the chief challenge for the emergency response organisation is not the scarcity of information, but its excess: too much information can strain the capacity of both the infrastructure and of the decision making functions of the organisation [1]. Much of the communication will be broadcasted rather than targeted to individuals, resulting in high volumes of traffic that need to be filtered by the emergency responders.

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