dispatcher

A dispatcher is a person or system that directs resources to fulfill requests by determining the appropriate destination, communicating instructions, and coordinating actions. The term often implies routing, assignment, or scheduling to ensure tasks reach the correct recipient or process.

In public safety and transportation, emergency dispatchers receive calls, verify information, and coordinate responders such as police, fire, and medical teams. Transportation and service industries employ dispatchers to assign units, monitor status, and optimize routes for efficiency and timeliness. In logistics, dispatching involves organizing the movement of goods and personnel across locations.

In computing, a dispatcher refers to a component that routes work or events to appropriate handlers. In operating systems and runtimes, a dispatcher or scheduler selects the next process or thread to run and enforces priorities and fairness. In event-driven and GUI frameworks, a dispatcher queues events and invokes handlers in the correct thread or context to maintain thread safety. In distributed systems and message-oriented middleware, a dispatcher may route messages to workers or subscribers according to rules or load balancing. In user interfaces, a UI dispatcher ensures that code affecting the interface executes on the designated thread.

The dispatcher concept also appears as a software design pattern that decouples producers of work from consumers, enabling flexible, scalable architectures. In many programming environments, dispatchers are provided as libraries or services to manage asynchronous work, events, and cross-thread communication.