ICT integration of public protection and disaster relief: services for fire and rescue personnel (original) (raw)

International Journal of Computers, Communications & Control (IJCCC)

In field operations of Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) services, vehicles are the most important tools. Today, the vehicles are increasingly dependent on ICT systems. PPDR responder's need is to enhance mission critical voice with broadband data. Command and control applications aboard a vehicle are commonplace. There is a need to ease situational awareness and decision making by utilizing sensor information, such as satellite or network based position information, living video images. However, each country and even every single user organization is developing their own solutions according to their legislation and requirements, because uniform standards are missing. The Mobile Object Bus Interaction (MOBI) research project is a kick off for creating a common international ICT infrastructure for all PPDR vehicles. MOBI researches possibilities to further develop and integrate ICT systems, applications and services of PPDR vehicles. MOBI aims at starting the development of standards used by like-minded countries and possibly with the European Commission, the European Law Enforcement Agency EUROPOL and the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders FRONTEX. This paper concentrates on services for fire and rescue personnel and researches the Finnish fire and rescue environment and t h e I C T s y s t e m s u s e d i n a c t i o n. P P D R s e r v i c e s c o n s t i t u t e a distributed system. Software development paradigms which have been used in the past for distributed systems have inherent limitations that do not support integration, interoperability and reusability. To contribute towards resolving the well known issues of integration and interoperability between ICT systems in emergency vehicles which often work in a collaborative fashion, a preliminary investigation of the applicability of SOA and Web Services Standards towards the optimization of ICT systems and services provided by emergency vehicles is presented.