Emergency services situation awareness
Rachel Craddock and David Harmer describe how Thales Research and Technology UK Ltd is developing situation awareness technologies for the emergency services, essential for effective crisis management
Situation awareness is required for effective crisis management, especially when the crisis is complex, or spread over a large geographic area. Emergency services' commanders need timely access to information representing the current situation in order to assess what is occurring and how future activities can be planned. They need to know the location of personnel and equipment, especially at the incident site, for incident ground accountability. When different agencies work together they need to be able to share information with each other, some of which may be on their own IT network. Many traditional IT security approaches are highly effective at hiding such information, thus it becomes difficult to share information and difficult to maintain a common situation picture.
Thales Research and Technology UK (TRT UK), part of a global network of research centres supporting the Thales Group, has recently been developing situation awareness technologies for the emergency services. The Secure Situation Awareness (SSA) concept demonstrator integrates together several technologies into a single situation awareness system, using public and private sources. For example, publicly available information e.g. weather forecasts, traffic reports, and news, can be combined with private information e.g. location of fire engines, status of the incident and the response, and position of cordons. Information can be displayed in real time as events unfold. This information includes emergency service vehicle locations and status, resources, eyewitness reports, control unit locations, incident locations, evacuation points, road closures and response progress reports.
In addition to providing situation awareness to emergency response commanders, the SSA can also be used to provide information to people outside the emergency services e.g. the press and the public, while still protecting more sensitive information. Thus, emergency commanders are able to view all available information whereas responders at the incident e.g. fire-fighters are given a more restricted view relevant to completing their tasks, while the public are provided with access on how the crisis will affect them, e.g. where the evacuation centres are, what a worried relative should do, which roads are closed and so on. A filtered version of the information is also provided to the media to answer their questions – freeing up resources that might otherwise be required to liaise with the media.
The situation awareness interface is based on the concept of a 'web mashup' and uses an information security technology developed by TRT UK called OBSCURE. Using OBSCURE it is possible to provide a secure data environment for users with different security clearances. This environment allows each user to share information available at their particular level of clearance. Through the use of OBSCURE, different levels of access to information can be enforced so that different users only see the information that they are authorised to see. This feature of OBSCURE can be used to filter the complete set of situation awareness information, thus providing each emergency services' commanders with the information relevant to them.
The combination of these two technologies makes the situation awareness concept demonstrator secure, quick to construct, easy to customise and flexible, both in terms of display interfaces and security policies. The demonstrator also provides a capability for investigating the issues of the right information in the right form to the right people at the right time. The demonstrator has been developed for emergency management, but is applicable to a wide range of other applications, including defence activities e.g. area surveillance, command and control, network-centre operations and asset protection, and civilian activities e.g. event management, resource management and transport logistics.
TRT UK has also developed a technology that provides indoor and outdoor location information for emergency services personnel. This can provide:
· Improved situation awareness enabling more effective coordination of activities
· Improved safety – for example each person has an alarm facility; if activated this alerts the central controller who can see the location of the person on a map (in addition, locations of surrounding personnel are available allowing the best use of resources for a rescue if required)
· Incident ground accountability for personnel and equipment.
The project undertaking this development, called EUROPCOM, is part-funded by the Framework 6 Programme of the European Commission. The EUROPCOM personnel tags utilise Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) technology to provide location information about the tagged person or item. This technology can provide accurate location data in environments in which satellite positioning (GPS) cannot operate, such as inside buildings. Combining the UWB technology with GPS provides seamless indoor/outdoor positioning and also enables the positions to be plotted on a 'geo-referenced' building/site plan. Position information can be sent from a EUROPCOM tag back to the base station unit, where the situation awareness tool can be used to provide a Geographical Information System (GIS) interface for this information.
Rachel Craddock and David Harmer
Thales Research and Technology UK Ltd.
Rachel Craddock, Principal Engineer, Thales Research & Technology (UK)
For the past three years, Rachel has been working on applying TRT's range of technologies to crisis management. Much of this work involves developing technologies for command and control; her current work concentrates on applying the nuVa collaborative solution to this area, in both civilian and military scenarios.
David Harmer, Chief Engineer, Thales Research & Technology (UK)
David received an honours degree in Natural Sciences (Physics), from Cambridge University in 1976 and has worked on a variety of Research & Development projects at TRT (and its predecessors) since then. He is experienced in the management of engineering project teams, System Design, DSP algorithms and embedded software development.
