An Efficient Event-Based Protocol for Emergency Situations in Smart Cities

Smart cities can offer a number of important and needed services for the citizens, including smart emergency services. In an emergency situation, mobile units such as police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances should move to the emergency location, thus performing an adequate care. A key question for achieving high performance in the service is to define and apply criteria to select and activate mobile units for each emergency situation. This paper presents an event-based protocol with event filtering by subscriber’s fitness, named Event to Most Suitable Subscribers (EMSS), by which the most appropriate mobile units are activated. A publish-subscribe middleware that implements the EMSS protocol was also developed. An application of the middleware to the police and the firefighter services is presented. The results show that, in the case where the most suitable mobile units are chosen, the service response time can be reduced. Therefore, the emergencies are more quickly attended, what is crucial for saving lives.