Mobile Agents in Healthcare, a Distributed Intelligence Approach - Computational Intelligence in Healthcare: Advanced Methodologies - page 59

During the emergency response agent-based systems can provide a number of im-
portant benefits:

- Agents have the ability to operate in highly dynamic environments.
- They can work in decentralized and distributed networks.
- They have the ability to search and collect distributed information, verify, process,
analyze, and interpret it for later use and management.
- They are suitable for decision using the data collected by a single agent or ex-
changed with several agents.

Despite having these advantages, only a few emergency management systems are based
on agents [9].

4.3 Communications in the Emergency Scene

The emergency scene is characterized by several zones. The first one is the Zone 0, also
called the hot zone, which is the place where the disaster has happened and where the
victims are at the beginning. Then there is the Zone 1, with the Advanced Medical Post
(AMP) and the Advanced Command Post (ACP), which are improvised medical infras-
tructures for the emergency. Other zones can be considered outside of the emergency
area, such as Zone 2 and Zone 3, for the hospitals which will receive the victims and
the medical centers which have treated them before the incident respectively. This last
comprises the data which compose the victims' medical records.
Referring to the emergency area, the AMP is the hospital that treat the victims before
they can be transferred to a hospital. And the ACP is the place where the coordination
team is. From this place, all the decisions about actions to be carried out by rescue and
medical teams are taken.
Communications in the emergency scene are getting more and more important. This
is due to the greater use of Internet enabled devices and mobile phones by the emer-
gency personnel. Their devices require networks such as mobile phone network (3G) or
WiMAX. In most of the emergency cases, hurricanes, terrorist attacks, floodings, and so
on, these networks become unstable, unaccessible, overused and even destroyed. As a
consequence, emergency personnel cannot use existing network infrastructure. Hence,
they should deploy and use their own, or simply use wireless mobile ad-hoc networks
(MANETs) or wireless mesh networks. These networks create routes by request of the
nodes that are maintained as long as they are needed or the link is available.
If the emergency area is too large, it is possible that the ad-hoc network created by
the medical personnel's devices would not be fully connected. As a result, an attempt
to communicate between two points of the network could be unsuccessful.
The AMP and ACP always have Internet connection even if the network infrastruc-
tures are destroyed or unusable. They use their own deployed network infrastructure, for
instance, satellite connections. For the AMP and the ACP, it is very important to have
Internet connection for coordination or information communications (f.e. with another
coordination point or with hospitals assigned to victims).