Emergency management centers, the key ally for urban security

(To Indra)
12/04/16

Cities are increasingly exposed to risk situations in which traditional security mechanisms become insufficient. The need for greater operational coordination between security and emergency forces is increasingly evident. And this is where technology is a key and differential factor.

Knowledge and experience in installing technology in various markets, including security, has allowed Indra to develop a complete solution for risk and emergency situations: the Safety and Emergency Centers.

How the Safety and Emergency Centers work

The "brain" of these Safety and Emergency Centers is the Operations Center, a room where the bodies in charge of emergency management work in a coordinated manner: law enforcement, firefighters, health and mobility personnel, civil protection, etc.

These professionals monitor the 24 hours situation on 24. For this they have access to the network of traffic control and surveillance cameras for private buildings thanks to Indra's Integra solution. They also receive weather, seismic, radiological information, etc. coming from other official bodies.

Furthermore, the center answers all citizens' emergency calls and uses the software iThink by Indra to track down social networks and find out about any risk situation in the city.

When the alarm goes off, the professionals of the center manage, through the solution iSafety of Indra, a unique answer. This tool allows you to identify available resources and assign them a mission based on their location.

On the field, the staff also has the application available within their vehicles iSafety which allows them to send and receive instructions from the control center and to access the number of units sent to deal with the emergency. At the same time, a video wall in the emergency center's operations room allows monitoring and coordination of the mission.

In order to guarantee resilience, the center is equipped with radio communications systems, TETRA communications, GPRS / UMTS telephony, satellite communications and access to wifi networks. The goal is to prevent the center from being subject to the collapse of communications as often occurs in crisis situations.

The ultimate goal of this solution is to facilitate operational coordination between security and emergency forces by contributing to an immediate, coordinated and quality citizen response. Furthermore, the solution allows the rational and optimized use of human and material resources, centralizing information and helping with planning and decision-making. Finally, it allows to have the register of actions for the subsequent analysis and for the creation of prevention policies.

To exploit the information already available to the security forces and organizations, Indra installs its Sofia2 middleware in these centers, a system that allows the interoperability of heterogeneous systems with a big data, cloud, open source and multilingual approach. Sofia2 also allows the integration of data from the various sensors distributed throughout the city.

Centers developed by Indra

More than 40 millions of citizens can already benefit from this solution developed by Indra. Among the references emerges that of the "Centro Integrado de Seguridad y Emergencias" (CISEM) in Madrid (Spain), created after the 11 March 2004 terrorist attacks. CISEM is a pioneer in Europe and since its opening in the 2007 it has become the reference center for emergency management and for coordinating the interventions of the Municipality's Security Services. This has allowed the city to improve the coordination of the resources of the institutions and reduce the response times to emergencies.

Since 2011, the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, has also had its own “Centro Único de Coordinación y Control de Emergencias (CUCC - photo on the left)”, a pioneer in Latin America. This technology installed by Indra in Buenos Aires allows the unified management of calls to the number of emergencies and the coordination of the interventions of the forces assigned to them.

Indra has also developed the Emergency Response Center (ERC) of the Directorate General for Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection (DG-ECHO) of the European Commission. It is the operational and coordination center for the resources of the various States belonging to the European Civil Protection Mechanism. Located in Brussels, the center allows the European Union to respond to natural disasters, terrorist attacks and technological, radiological and environmental incidents anywhere in the world, coordinating the resources available in all Member States.