Application of mobile agents in wireless-based mission critical emergency operations

In the ambiguous, high stress, and time sensitive environment of mission critical emergency operations, the decision-making process could benefit from a distributed pattern of mobile resources across a wireless network. Dealing with challenges in these environments, mobile agents can move across the wireless setup, having many promising attributes including autonomy, adaptability, and persistency. These attributes make them able to act independently, to sense and interact with their environment and to make decisions on behalf of the users. Mobile agents are particularly suitable for the situations where the distributed information throughout a network is crucial for other applications/services/agents which heavily rely on, and are sensitive to situation-based and well-timed information. Until now there has been a lack of studies that approach issues of disaster response in a way that integrates these technologies while also considering the human and organisational perspectives. In this paper we present and investigate an intense man-made disaster. Results show that mobile agents can in many ways augment the performance of communication systems working in extreme environments of mission critical emergency operations.