Moving Towards IPV6

This document describes the possibilities for Internet Protocol communications in crisis situations. Its main goal is to show IPv4 and IPv6 solutions developed during the lifetime of the SECRICOM project. Communications technologies in current use are showing their limitations. Whether reacting to a small incident or a great catastrophe, first responders increasingly need to share information such as video, images or other data. Society’s evolving expectations concerning safety can be compared with the development of Internet protocols. We examine IP-based communication for crisis management, and show that it is ready to bind together currently fragmented technologies such as TETRA and analogue radios, providing a new dimension of interoperability, including cross-border communication

Collaboration Web - Social Computing Technology for Emergency Data Interoperability

This paper discusses the use of social media for data interoperability and sharing between agencies during emergency situations, natural disasters, and disruptions of critical infrastructure. The work presented is ongoing in the context of the REDIRNET (Emergency Responders Data Interoperability Network) research project. The project’s purpose is to provide a decentralized framework for interoperability between emergency agencies’ systems, based on a public meta-data gateway controlled by the agencies through a socio-professional web interface. A major problem during crisis situations is sharing data from various sources between the agencies involved. These data are often heterogeneous and distributed between many organisations with different access rights, and may have little or no security level protection. This paper focuses on the shared platform, which collects information from a variety of sensor nodes and presents it in a user-friendly manner

Visual Public Protection Disaster Relief and Critical Infrastructure

Modern society is increasingly dependent on critical infrastructure and on the services that it provides. The loss of one of these services may hit the public immediately in manners which are not always predictable. Furthermore, the amount of time that a given service is unavailable will affect other services through numerous direct and indirect dependencies, which are seldom considered. Natural or man-made disasters, and combinations of both, will have effects that are difficult or impossible to foresee without the appropriate tools. Due to the rapid progress in electronic communications and information technology, one would expect today’s crisis managers to have access to situational awareness and to the tools needed to inform their decisions. While much has been achieved for single-service operational headquarters like those of police, firefighting and ambulance services, there are no solutions that address the interactions and interdependencies of all critical functions and all critical infrastructure in a Public Protection and Disaster Response context. If a crisis develops when some aspect of critical infrastructure is partly or completely unavailable, crisis managers must make decisions using a very different framework compared to that used to handle limited incidents in normal times. Considering the difficulties resulting from the dependencies and interdependencies of critical infrastructure in normal times, making good decisions is becoming more and more difficult for crisis managers during a crisis. These challenges, combined with the enormous and possibly tragic consequences of suboptimal crisis management, provide good reasons to explore the subject

REDIRNET – Emergency Responder Data Interoperability Network

European states regularly experience a wide range of major crisis events, including not only environmental disasters such as major flooding, avalanches and earthquakes, but also man-made incidents involving large-scale transport-related accidents and terrorist-sponsored events. When responding to such incidents, Emergency service agencies and rescue organisations are working together more frequently to enhance their overall operational effectiveness, often requiring collaboration across state borders. The REDIRNET project benefits multi-agency joint-working by facilitating information exchange through the concept of broad-scale data interoperability

Seamless Communication for Crises Management

SECRICOM is proposed as a collaborative research project aiming at development of a reference security platform for EU crisis management operations with two essential ambitions: (A) Solve or mitigate problems of contemporary crisis communication infrastructures (Tetra, GSM, Citizen Band, IP) such as poor interoperability of specialized communication means, vulnerability against tapping and misuse, lack of possibilities to recover from failures, inability to use alternative data carrier and high deployment and operational costs. (B) Add new smart functions to existing services which will make the communication more effective and helpful for users. Smart functions will be provided by distributed IT systems based on an agents’ infrastructure. Achieving these two project ambitions will allow creating a pervasive and trusted communication infrastructure fulfilling requirements of crisis management users and ready for immediate application