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Load Balancing for Disaster Recovery and Management

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Abstract

In this paper, the design and working of a patient load balancing system is described to enhance the automated patient handling in mass disasters involving scores of injured victims. The MEDTOC system developed earlier is augmented to handle the larger size of disasters resulting from mass casualty events. This load balancing system can be deployed urgently if the scope of the disaster is larger than estimated initially. It starts to operate when a large number of patients have been assigned to area hospitals and some hospitals have become overloaded. This system assigns affinity values to patients based on their trauma condition and moves the selected patients between hospitals until all the hospitals have stabilized. The system is implemented on a simulated disaster and results are presented. The results show improvement in the load conditions of hospitals.

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Acknowledgments

The authors appreciate the financial support by the American University of Ras Al Khaimah (AURAK) through seed grant funded Project No. ENGR-015-001 provided by the School of Graduate Studies and Research. Engineer Arslan Ahmed has implemented the full simulation of MEDTOC and the load balancing through C and Matlab programs and provided the results through several tables and graphs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Engineering Department, School of Engineering, American University of Ras al Khaimah, P.O. Box 10021, Ras al Khaimah, UAE

    Sahar Idwan & Junaid Ahmed Zubairi

  2. The Hashemite University, P.O. Box 330127, Zarqa, 13133, Jordan

    Sahar Idwan

  3. State University of New York, Fredonia, NY, 14063, USA

    Junaid Ahmed Zubairi

Authors
  1. Sahar Idwan
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  2. Junaid Ahmed Zubairi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sahar Idwan.

Additional information

Dr. Sahar Idwan on Leave from The Hashemite University, P.O. Box 330127, Zarqa 13133, Jordan and Prof. Junaid Ahmed Zubairi on leave from State University of New York at Fredonia, Fredonia, NY USA 14063.

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Idwan, S., Zubairi, J.A. Load Balancing for Disaster Recovery and Management. Wireless Pers Commun 90, 369–379 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-016-3373-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-016-3373-y

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