Greenbelt, MD — ElanTech, Inc. announced today the successful integration of its Incident Management Decision Support System (IMDSS) with the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) national architecture for emergency information sharing during an interoperability demonstration conducted on April 29. The IMDSS is a software tool that aggregates diverse information pertinent to the management of an emergency into one geospatially organized digital dashboard.
The successful demonstration is a significant step forward in the deployment of the DHS’s Unified Incident Command and Decision Support (UICDS) platform, a middleware foundation that enables commercial and government incident management technologies to share information and support decisions for the National Response Framework and National Incident Management to prevent, protect, respond, and recover from natural, technological, and terrorist events. UICDS is sponsored by the Science and Technology Directorate of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and is being executed through a contract with prime contractor Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)[NYSE:SAI].
Through the IMDSS software application, UICDS will provide on-site incident commanders with the real-time, dynamic data they need to coordinate the efforts of first responders.
“We’re extremely pleased with how IMDSS performed in this demonstration situation and how it will ultimately benefit the first-responder community,” says Swati Allen, president of ElanTech. “We believe IMDSS provides a very robust yet practical interface for UICDS – not only providing powerful tools in the field, but also making it simple for first-responder organizations to adapt their existing technologies for UICDS compliance. We look forward to helping these organizations tie into this groundbreaking interoperability platform down the road.”
In the aftermath of a natural disaster or other catastrophic event, first responders and emergency managers must have access to information such as 911 calls and maps as well as non-traditional data such as traffic, weather, resource availability and more. Today, this data is available from disparate applications, sensors, e-mail, web pages and other sources in non-standard formats. As applied to UICDS, the IMDSS will overcome these interoperability issues and enable emergency managers to make better, faster decisions.
The Virginia Department of Emergency Management (VDEM) hosted the UICDS demonstration at the Virginia Emergency Operations Center (VEOC) in Richmond. The UICDS prototype implementation integrated information from 23 commercial, government and academic technology provider applications, demonstrating how this information is shared among applications and the jurisdictions they serve. The demonstration included six incident vignettes occurring in a simulated East Coast storm, with each vignette showing information sharing among five to seven applications currently in use by police, fire, emergency medical, emergency management, and other response organizations.
Chip Mahoney, the SAIC Project Manager for UICDS, said “The UICDS prototype demonstration illustrated how a wide variety of applications can share information through a diverse set of interfaces, data formats and networks using non-proprietary, open standards. From long-standing applications like computer-aided dispatch and asset management to more recent video surveillance and detection technologies to innovative new situational awareness tools, the UICDS Architecture Specification accommodates the information exchanges emergency managers and responders need to help save lives, protect property, and minimize economic loss.”
The IMDSS is based on ElanTech’s Sensor Analyst’s Geo-Intelligence Engine (SAGE®) product, which provides a service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework for the IMDSS to ingest, process, and visualize data and then share resulting knowledge.
ElanTech was awarded the contract for development of the IMDSS by the National Institute for Hometown Security in April, 2009.
About ElanTech, Inc. ElanTech (www.elantech-inc.com) is a government prime contractor specializing in software engineering and development of geointelligence solutions for commercial and government clients.
Media Contact: Sam Zappas, ElanTech, Inc. Phone: 301-486-0600 x201 Email: Contact@elantech-inc.com