Design of a Network Independent Emergency Service

• Main Author: Khayltash, Golara
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: 2007
• Subjects: emergency services; OSA/Parlay; distributed systems; RM-ODP; location-based services
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10539/2151

Student Number : 9301997W - MSc thesis - School of Electrical and Information Engineering - Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment === Emergency services are vital for the minimization of damage, injury and loss of life. These services are, by definition, a combination of telecommunications and information services, and are by nature, distributed. However, most current emergency services do not take advantage of emerging technology, and hence, are restricted in the functionality they offer. This project proposes the design a full information structure for an emergency call centre service, which can be offered as a service or application on any core network. As emergency services are distributed, and combine both telecommunications and information services, an appropriate design tool which caters for these issues, is the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP), which will be used in the design of the emergency service. In addition, OSA/Parlay Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) will be used for the application to access telecommunication network functionality. The enterprise viewpoint examines the design requirements and considerations for an emergency system, which is the first step in designing a service based on the RMODP guidelines. Secondly, the information viewpoint is defined, which identifies the information flows between the objects and classes defined in the enterprise viewpoint with the aid of robustness diagrams and high level message sequence charts. Next, the computational viewpoint of the emergency service describes the components that the service consists of and the interfaces through which they communicate, enabling distribution of the system to be visualized. In addition, the engineering and technology viewpoints are briefly touched upon. The RM-ODP proves to be a useful tool the design of this application. In addition, the use of OSA/Parlay APIs have also proved beneficial, enabling the application to run on any platform, irrespective of the level of functionality it already provides. The benefits that this design offers over conventional emergency services are allowing callers and emergency response personnel full access to the functionality of the service, despite any limitations on their telecommunications network, finding the location of a caller from a fixed or mobile phone, ease and speed of obtaining relevant emergency information, and the ease and speed of sending relevant information to emergency response personnel. Finally we recommend improvements in the reliability and accuracy of finding the location of mobile phones, as well as creating ways of identifying the location of VoIP users.