In the United States, six million traffic accidents occur annually. Local agencies often deal with minor traffic incidents and congestion, while regional agencies face more complex challenges such as hazardous material (HAZMAT) spills, train derailments, and major accidents that can affect larger areas. At the state level, agencies handle incidents involving airports, seaports, major bridge closures, and industrial incidents. On a national scale, agencies contend with widespread weather-related disasters, extended outages, and major incidents with nationwide impacts.
Beyond simply wanting to know what is happening from minute to minute, real-time situational awareness is essential for maintaining public safety. This discussion defines real-time situational awareness and interoperability concepts, examines challenges posed by a lack of interoperability in real-time updates, explores strategies for aligning resources during emergent situations, and highlights the benefits of an integrated system for agency operations.
Key Concepts
What is Real-Time Situational Awareness?
Real-time situational awareness is knowing what is happening in your environment as it unfolds. In the shipping industry, this means monitoring the real-time movement of trucks across the country to help anticipate delivery schedules. In the airline industry, it involves tracking planes on a screen to ensure they land safely and without incident.
Real-time situational awareness enables decision-makers and first responders to quickly assess events, select the correct plan of action, and implement plans effectively. This ensures assistance is dispatched to the right place, at the right time, and in the safest and most efficient way possible.
While local incidents may last only minutes or hours, nationwide events can span months or even years. As the duration—or “reach”—of an event increases, so does the number of agencies involved. This requires communication systems to scale accordingly, ensuring seamless information exchange and communication among agencies.
A significant obstacle to this essential communication is lack of interoperability—the ability of different systems, devices, or organizations to communicate and work together effectively. Without interoperability, organizations face delays in decision-making, reduced response efficiencies, and challenges in coordinating incident management. But what exactly is interoperability, and why is it a critical factor for real-time situational awareness?
What is Interoperability?
Agencies are increasingly recognizing the need for communications interoperability, which the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) defines as “the ability of emergency response agencies to talk to one another via communication systems—to exchange voice and/or data with one another on demand, in real time, when needed, and as authorized.”
Public transportation and safety agencies operate across local, regional, state, and national jurisdictions, often resulting in communication systems that are siloed by agency and jurisdiction. Currently, no standardized approach exists for information-sharing across agencies, meaning a city-wide system may not be compatible with the system being used by the state government. What are the implications of this lack of standardization, and what challenges does it create?
Challenges Stemming from Interoperability Gaps
Without interoperability, different systems can create significant challenges. For example, a local store experiencing a real-time break-in might capture video of the incident but have no way to stream it to the police as it occurs. Similarly, a congested county roadway might not have a way to share traffic updates with state or city agencies, preventing them from rerouting vehicles to avoid the affected area.
To enable real-time information sharing across jurisdictions and agencies, these different systems must be able to communicate effectively—with interoperability. During an incident, the following types of information and communication systems are typically required to answer four critical questions:
- Where is it? Determining the location of an incident requires sharing geographic information via geographic information systems (GIS) or global positioning systems (GPS).
- Can we talk about it? Effective voice communication is essential and can be supported by systems like land mobile radio (LMR) and cellular broadband (LTE)—as well as a situational awareness solution like a critical incident management system (CIMS).
- What do we know about it? Access to relevant data is crucial, including disparate static datasets (like census information), real-time sensors (e.g., weather stations, flood gauges, and gunshot detection), and other Internet of Things (IoT) sensors.
- Can we see it? Visual information such as static photographs or a video system, is vital for monitoring and documenting the situation in real time.
Attaining real-time situational awareness requires a thorough understanding of existing communications and data systems, as well as interoperability. Agencies must evaluate how their systems interface with others to ensure seamless collaboration and effective response times during incidents.
Strategies to Achieve Interoperability During Emergency Incidents
To achieve the level of interoperability needed for effective communication, you must align three key resources: people, processes, and technology.
People
Start with your team, including internal stakeholders and external vendors. Assess and identify key practitioners, technical experts, academics, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and not-for-profits (NFPs) to determine who is or should be involved in your interoperability efforts. Anticipate the types of emergency incidents you are likely to encounter and identify the agencies and jurisdictions that will need to collaborate. Establishing these relationships early will help build trust and secure buy-in, supporting the successful implementation of interoperability.
Process
Effectively implementing interoperability requires aligning people and technology to achieve seamless systems integration. This process involves identifying what data needs to be shared, with whom, and at what time. Building consensus among stakeholders is essential, as is identifying action steps, implementing long-term governance structures, and maintaining a sustained commitment to continual improvement.
Technology
Technology is the final piece of this puzzle. Start by assessing your current and future capabilities: What data can you analyze? What software, applications, networks, and hardware resources are available? What level of security does your system require? Answering these questions is essential to enable effective information sharing and to develop the alignment required for achieving true interoperability.
Why Do You Need an Integrated System?
Determining how much to connect systems among agencies to achieve interoperability is challenging. Costs are high when multiple jurisdictional or agency systems require duplicative infrastructure, while interoperability is limited when there are incompatible systems. While one system across jurisdictions and agencies might be more challenging to govern, it can still reduce costs by sharing fixed costs across a larger user base. By assessing your agencies’ information-sharing needs, you can strike the right balance between integration and practicality.
There is a continuum of systems integration ranging from separate (i.e., no interoperability) to converged (i.e., complete interoperability) as described below:
- Separate Systems. In this system approach, private, local, and state agencies operate in complete silos with no integration. While this makes governing each system easy, it increases costs due to duplicated infrastructures and results in nonexistent interoperability.
- Connected Systems. In this system approach, private, local, and state agencies are minimally connected. While they still function separately, the interoperability level is higher than in separate systems. Costs remain high but may be lower than those of separate systems.
- Integrated Systems. In this system approach, one or more agencies connect and integrate their systems to achieve alignment. While not all agencies are fully integrated, this method enables lower costs and improved interoperability. Governance becomes more challenging as systems are integrated, but the benefits of enhanced communication and infrastructure cost savings help mitigate these challenges.
- Converged Systems. In this ecosystem, all agencies are fully converged, meaning they can operate as one on their systems. This is the lowest-cost option with the highest level of interoperability. However, governance is more difficult, as individual agencies cannot make unilateral decisions.
Most agencies are moving from separate to connected systems, and then moving toward integrated systems. An integrated system is a powerful step toward achieving alignment in your people, processes, and technology.
Three Layers of Interoperability
The goal of interoperability is to make needed information available to the right people at the right time. Achieving this requires connecting disparate data from a variety of data sources across multiple agencies through a layered approach. The approach we advocate includes three layers:
- Data Layer. The sources of information including video, maps, databases, and protocols.
- Integration Layer. Standardizes all the information to prepare it for delivery to the end user.
- Presentation Layer. Provides the user with access to all the needed information.
The three-layer approach recognizes that there will always be separate systems in the data layer and investing in an integration layer is essential to make the data more accessible and useful to those outside the source agency. The integration layer accesses, standardizes, and makes consumable the data layer information. By organizing the interoperability challenge into three layers, you can address each layer individually, build upon existing solutions, and integrate new ones as needed.
In the next article, we’ll discuss the three layers of interoperability in depth, including what should be in each layer, how information needs to move from one layer to the next, and what can be achieved with this approach.
Skyline Technology Solutions Can Help!
Solving interoperability challenges and achieving real-time situational awareness requires creating architectural solutions based on the ability to share information. At Skyline, our innovative solutions for smart public safety and transportation technologies will help enhance situational awareness in ways that traditional operational models and infrastructure systems cannot.
To learn more about how Skyline can help you advance your interoperability and real-time situational awareness through an integrated system, contact us.
John Contestabile, Director, Public Safety Solutions