Unified Incident Command and Decision Support (UICDS): A Department of Homeland Security Initiative in Information Sharing

Unified incident command and decision support is an initiative to architect, develop, and deploy a "middleware" foundation that enables ubiquitous information exchange among existing government and commercial incident management technologies for the purpose of creating role-based, incident-specific situational awareness and information sharing. This paper describes the architecture and pilot development that will lead to UICDS providing decision support on end-user digital devices that include standard computers, PDAs, and radios to individuals, teams, and organizations that engage in risk prevention, protection, response, and recovery. A case study of decision support enabled by UICDS describes how geospatial predictive analytics utilizes UICDS information sources to anticipate potential natural, technological, and terrorist events and effectively allocate resources to counter them.