Decision support system network analysis for emergency applications

Preparedness is the main criteria for immediate response for any emergency response provider (ERP) and decision support system. Emergency Response System can be either for fire emergency response system, or police station emergency response system and healthcare emergency response system. Emergency decision support system is imperative for the reduction of disaster losses and the efficiency improvement of emergency resources allocation. The objective of this paper is to establish a Geographic Information System (GIS) based healthcare emergency response system for services that can identify the optimal route from the location of incident to any healthcare service providers, and the optimal route was modeled based on the distance (the shortest path) to the closest healthcare service providers. Therefore, the main outcome from this research is to provide immediate response to any request for incidents or accidents. Basic idea behind developing this web application is that a case (patient) or incident occurs at a particular location (latitude and longitude). Knowing those locations and mapping them using (GIS) would greatly help in analyzing and visualizing the various factors associated with the incident and thus would help in providing better decision making and quicker response for any incident or accident using ArcGIS Server and web application. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the aims and objective of the research, Section 3 discusses the methodology which includes the description of the study area, data inputs and healthcare emergency response model parameters. In section 4, analyses including shortest path, spatial queries and also service area for healthcare providers are displayed. Results are presented and interpretation is illustrated in Section 4. Conclusions and discussions of future research works are outlined in Section 5.