UnitySM is a simulation engine that lets users monitor the operational status of any asset (such as a person, place or vehicle) that’s logged into their system. Developed by software development company Priority 5, UnitySM also keeps track of its relationships with other assets that might be dependent on that asset, according to Priority 5 President and CEO Charles Miller.
The software provides a big-picture view of a crisis, giving decision-makers a comprehensive outlook of a situation.
“The problem the decision-maker has today is, he has all these disparate sources of information that tend to be siloed or stovepiped and he has to put them together and make a decision,” Miller said. “What we do is bring them together in an interactive way so that you can see the totality of all these inputs.”
For example, as an integrated software platform, it could display a satellite image (something you might see with Google Earth) and then integrate data from a second source that’s monitoring traffic flow and a third that has the GPS coordinates of emergency vehicles. The user would be looking at one screen with all data points integrated without switching back and forth to retrieve information from disparate sources. The user gets a complete picture based on a customized platform.
The program allows for understanding what might happen if conditions change.
“What this creates is, at all times a dynamic common operating picture that is up-to-the-minute based not only on sensor and input data [that provides a] direct impact, but you also can track the cascading impact on all the assets throughout the system,” Miller said.
“We may have a train that’s been derailed and there may be a chlorine tank on that train and now we have a contaminant in the air that’s dispersing,” said Anthony McDermott, Priority 5 director of product development and marketing.
A local emergency management team is using contaminant dispersion capabilities from a program developed by the Naval Research Laboratory, an evacuation model hypothetically created by Lockheed Martin and a real-time traffic modeling program from a third, unrelated vendor, McDermott said. In this scenario, preplanned evacuation routes have been compromised because
of the direction the contaminant is moving, requiring information from the three sources to be used in concert with one another to adjust evacuation planning.
“It’s three different code sets … and the UnitySM manager allows them all to interact and play nicely, producing a predecisional outcome where they can reset that environment and … see what the best course of action would be,” McDermott said.
Aiding the Oil Spill Response
While an example such as train derailment can be helpful in explaining what the software does, a real-world example sheds light on how this product can improve the efficiency of emergency management operations.
Such was the case in the response to the April 20, 2010, explosion on BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.
April Danos, IT director at the Greater Lafourche Port Commission (GLPC) in Port Fourchon, La., said her agency had just installed the simulation system in April 2010 prior to the explosion of the rig. While her staff members were still learning how to use the system, they soon relied on it.
Danos recalled that the system, called GLPC-C4, was designed to integrate many of the port’s pre-existing systems and technologies (e.g., closed-circuit TV, dynamic message boards and computer-aided dispatch alerts) into a single framework to improve situational awareness and conduct real-time consequence analysis.
It quickly became the platform that helped run the command center on a daily basis throughout the response to the explosion as well as the subsequent cleanup operations, Danos said. “It was very beneficial and gave people a lot of information from one common operating picture that they could make decisions off.”
But the real utility in the system during that time was its ability to interact with systems outside of the agency, in particular FEMA’s Integrated Situational Awareness Visualization Environment program and the Defense Department’s Knowledge Display and Aggregation System, built from the same technology, allowing for a broader coordinated response from federal, state and local agencies, with all parties having access to the same information. It also provided connectivity to other state and local emergency responders. Because systems from different agencies can communicate through the common platform, the various emergency responders don’t need to be in the same room to coordinate efforts and make adjustments to a response plan.
“So if you are setting up some kind of tactical scenario of how you can approach a security event or something, if the sheriff’s office wants to mark on the screen and say, ‘I am going to put my guys right here to block this road,’ and harbor police can say, ‘I am going to put my people right here and there is where we are going to station the media,’ it gives you that common picture that can go all the way up to the Department of Defense and FEMA,” Danos said.
A Customizable, Living Solution
McDermott said building a system like the one for the GLPC starts with a commercial-off-the-shelf product referred to in-house at Priority 5 as the Touch Assisted Command and Control System (TACCS), which has some basic capabilities. A customer would then customize the product to fit the needs of its emergency response and typically rebrand the product.
“We don’t provide all those cameras,” McDermott said. “We don’t provide all the emergency notifications. We don’t provide the behavior analysis on the video analytics that come, but we do bring it together and organize it in a way that allows people to observe their environment. We allow them to spatially orient themselves to that environment and to other things, other threats, other vulnerabilities or other pieces of data that may affect the outcome of the situation.”
The platform is designed to run on a variety of hardware, including office-based units as well as mobile devices, such as iPads and Android-based products, providing key connectivity and comprehensive data sharing through one common output.
And customization does not necessarily stop with the initial purchase, Danos said.
“Anything we come across that we cannot do in the system for whatever reason, we basically let Priority 5 know and they work through it in their next updates or upgrades to try and resolve it,” Danos said, noting that many of the initial customized upgrades came in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Danos said that with the just-installed system, Priority 5 technicians worked with agency staff to modify the system as the events surrounding the oil spill unfolded. “If it wasn’t done for the oil spill, it was done in an upgrade soon after from lessons learned.”
