Research Project LAGE
Motivation
Large-scale situations require close cooperation by the various security authorities and organisations over a long period. Integrated IT solutions are not currently available in these situations, so that information must be exchanged by the liaison officers for each of the organisations concerned. Up till now this has been the only way of creating linkage.
Given the wide variety of systems already in use in security authorities and organisations that are used to manage operations, aid staff and help decision making during large-scale operations, it is unlikely that any uniformity or standardisation will be achieved in this area in the foreseeable future.
Scenario
A catastrophic incident at a main railway station has been chosen as the principal scenario. Within the critical infrastructure (a railway station) it is necessary to consider not only events involved in normal operations, but also extraordinary events, such as an accident or explosion. Various different parameters, such as the event itself, its place and time, affect the course of the scenario and create numerous alternative procedures for the deployment of relief units. It will be necessary, as it were, to note a main procedure, and a range of subsidiary procedures. The scenario will involve participation by a large number of organisations, a high degree of spatial complexity and, dependent upon the nature of the event, major dynamics in the situation and a long period of involvement. The community of participants in this case consists of government authorities and departments, the fire and ambulance brigades, German Civil Defence, the German Federal Disaster Management Office, the Federal (Railway) Police, and Deutsche Bahn AG.
The project and its aims
The aim of the linked project is to create, through standardised data exchange, a collective understanding, on the part of the security authorities and organisations involved, of the events, structures and processes involved in the operation, thus creating a collective picture of the situation. In this way it will be possible to coordinate action and avoid conflicts. The project is designed to prepare such standards for message exchange. Given the currently heterogeneous structure of available information systems, a “message hub” will be used, i.e. all available information will be converted through mediation (rule-based data transformation) into unambiguously interpretable data and fed to a situation database. This information pool and these integrated processes, taking all linked systems into account, will generate a collective situation picture, facilitating networked deployment of action forces. Existing information systems for collective crisis and catastrophe management will be integrated and the situation picture thus created will be evaluated. No new application will be created in this process; instead, through exchange of messages between existing information systems, it will be possible to support “networked operational deployment” on the part of security authorities and organisations.
Innovations and applications
Establishing interoperability of the different participants technical systems is a challenge to be achieved in this project through innovative approaches. On the foundation of existing standards, and by building up a new generic data model, the basis for a standard “xHelp” will be defined jointly with the community of participants. Realisation of an innovative, linked, results-controlled system common to all security authorities and organisations for overarching decision making will be displayed using a demonstrator.
The project is financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
