The first pilot demonstrations of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Unified Incident Command and Decision Support (UICDS) system have been completed, Science Applications International Corporation, San Diego, Calif., an engineering and systems integration firm serving as prime contractor on the project, reported late last week.

The first test demo was held April 29 in coordination with Virginia Emergency Operations Center (VEOC) in Richmond, Va. A follow-up testing event took place in late May.

UICDS, an information architecture blueprint for managing and sharing incident information across state and local jurisdictional lines and with DHS and other federal agencies, is sponsored by the Science and Technology Directorate of the US Department of Homeland Security.

The project is designed to enable police, fire, emergency medical and other response organizations to use incident management technologies to share information and provide decision support to help prevent, protect, respond, and recover from natural, technological, and terrorist events.

"This demonstration illustrated how information can be shared through a diverse set of interfaces, data formats and networks using non-proprietary, open standards," said Chip Mahoney, SAIC UICDS project manager. "From long-standing applications like computer-aided dispatch and asset management, to more recent video surveillance, detection technologies, and situational awareness tools - the UICDS architecture enables the information exchanges that emergency responders need to help save lives, protect property, and minimize economic loss."

The prototype implementation, Steve Panzer, vice-president of the government division at ObjectFX, Minneapolis, Minn., a developer of geospatial mapping applications and participant in the demo, told HSToday.us, 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.

“The whole idea of UICDS is to provide emergency responders with information to aid situational awareness more quickly. There’s been a lot of discussion and work done on overcoming silos that exist in interoperably public safety communications. There’s an incredible amount of situational awareness data that’s siloed, and far less useful that it could be.”

One aspect of the UICDS demo, according to Panzer, was to link videocam information collected at 800 traffic cams throughout the Washington DC metro area.

James W. Morentz, Ph.D., director of UICDS Outreach for SAIC, said, “Despite all the efforts devoted to data interoperability in recent years, the 23 technology providers represented in the demonstration came to the UICDS program with virtually no instances of sharing data with each other. Using the software development kit for the UICDS middleware and the National Information Exchange Model data exchange formats, these “first adopter” technology providers successfully demonstrated nearly one hundred real-time information exchanges. This demonstration points the way to a successful continuation of this government-sponsored, technology provider-driven information sharing across the full range of prevention, protection, response, and recovery.”

Testifying before the House Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Homeland Security in March, Acting Under Secretary Bradley I. Buswell, Science and Technology Directorate, had discussed UICDS, listing it as a priority item for testing deployment in 2009.

“This national architecture, a response to issues identified in the 9/11 Commission Report,” Buswell said, “is aimed at establishing a set of standards to which solution developers for incident management tools will adhere in order to ensure that recipients of DHS funds at the state/local level will procure incident information management systems that comply with uniform standards in order to solve the information interoperability problems.”

This fall, according to Panzer, UICDS testing will further ramp-up with a wider testing event to involve nine Northeastern states.