EAGER: US IGNITE: A Virtual Crisis Information Sharing and Situational Awareness Platform for Collaborative Disaster Response

University Of Louisiana At Lafayette, Lafayette LA

Investigators

Abstract

A picture is worth a thousand words; this is especially true during emergencies where images and video can provide better awareness than simple text. By exploiting community broadband infrastructure and by extending an existing emergency management system to allow for emergency personnel to transmit crisis related information in the form of sensors, photos, and video streams across local, regional, and federal emergency management and law enforcement agencies, this project expands the ability to respond to emergencies. It also recognizes that communication outages are one of the most broadly shared characteristic of all disasters. The failure of communication infrastructure creates serious situational awareness gaps for emergency managers that can lead to preventable loss of life, property damage, and serious economic impacts. The project utilizes advanced networking technology in the form of Software Defined Networking (SDN) to address communication failures. The project builds upon the Next Generation Incident Command System (NICS) - a system developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory with support from DHS S&T. The NICS platform provides a collaborative situational awareness platform for (1) First responders in the field to report data to incident commanders in near real-time, and (2) Emergency managers and first responders to share map-based situational awareness in near real-time. NICS was designed to operate on low-bandwidth networks and does not support sharing video among users - which is essential to get an accurate assessment of picture on the ground. This project extends NICS so that it leverages the existing ultra-fast networks available in US Ignite communities. It builds a situational awareness platform that provides the ability to view and share multiple high-resolution videos, images and documents, and provides reliable network connectivity by using Software Defined Networking technology to reroute traffic in the event of network problems.