An Emergency Information Sharing (EIS) framework for effective Shared Situational Awareness (SSA)

A deployable Emergency Information Sharing (EIS) framework is necessary to facilitate not only the sharing of critical, timely incident information with all responding emergency managers and organizations, but also to remotely command and monitor tactical actions, and communicate multi-media data to all first responders at the incident site. Consistent with the Presidential Policy Directive on National Preparedness (PPD-8), such a framework must “achieve an integrated, layered, and all-of-Nation [capabilities-based] preparedness approach that optimizes the use of available resources”. The resulting real-time, Shared Situational Awareness (SSA) between all emergency response organizations, managers, first responders, and even local citizens, will quickly mobilize and facilitate an effective, coordinated emergency response to minimize risks, hazards, and loss of life. Presented here is an approach to an effective EIS framework for SSA that is readily achievable, cost-effective, sustainable, and deployable in the near-term. Based on commercially available technology and network infrastructure, this proposed framework can achieve (1) federated data sharing among all participating agencies and organizations; (2) selective, shared real-time access to data/video feeds, controlled by each data feed owner; (3) secure, dynamic incident management sessions coordinating all managers and personnel; (4) a cloud solution operational over available network infrastructure; (5) mobile command and SSA on tablets/smartphones; and (6) a persistent, “always on” 24/7/365 solution for day-to-day and emergency operations. A proposed three-pronged approach is presented, using commercially available components, which demonstrates an EIS framework that achieves effective SSA. The EIS design includes (1) utilizing an open standard, data sharing framework, such as the Distributed Data Framework (DDF); (2) deploying on a NextGen Cloud Platform that provides scalable, resilient and reserved performance compute/storage/network access; and (3) leveraging an easy-to-use but powerful, four-dimensional data visualization, command & control, SSA browser/server system, such as fourDscape®. These three core components working together are crucial for an EIS framework to achieve an all-ofNation, pervasive, shared situational awareness at all levels. The need for “vertical” as well as “horizontal” (i.e. DDF) data sharing is also described, which requires a layered emergency information sharing framework and device mesh that relies more on a machine-to-machine (M2M) communications paradigm, which interestingly begins to touch on the global “Internet of Everything” frontier.