Control Room Trends – From Terma, Denmark
Introduction
A corner stone for efficient homeland security is well integrated communication and coordination solutions. While the communication is well under way and Europe is celebrating the success of the Tetra networks having worked impeccably for more than 10 years, the coordination i.e. control rooms are taking centre stage. With a rapid development of sophisticated solutions the control room evolve from simple dispatching of resources to advanced platforms for collaborative working, data sharing and analysis in real time.
Since the start of Tetra standardization in ETSI in 1988, the goal was primarily to replace old and low capacity analogue radio systems. The preparedness actors can now communicate, but the collaboration is lacking. Most preparedness organisations have been faced with a basic choice: The one-fits-all system for all preparedness actors, or to allow all local actors to select their own system which is optimised for their specific needs, but does not allow neither vertical nor horizontal integration.
The political pressure for a national and regional preparedness that works optimally in daily operations and major emergencies increases. In Denmark, a contract has been awarded for a national control room infrastructure and integration, which solves the challenges, referred to as “The Danish Model”, defining a secure high-speed data backbone network and a disaster tolerant central server site for storing of critical data such as resource positions, status and task data. This ensures a common data structure across all actors, but allows individual well fitting applications supporting the needs of the individual organisation.
Flexibility, reliability and security
The three keywords describing the future control rooms are reliability, security and flexibility,.
Reliability & Security
Reliability and security takes precedent above all. What is normally considered good enough for local, district or region, comes short when the question is about national security. The integrity of the solution and information cannot be compromised in a crisis situation and high availability must be ensured.
The new threath picture requires new actors to be integrated into the preparedness. Armed forces and homeland security organizations must now work together sharing information and acting together in many cases.
Due to the rising requirements for reliability and security, future key players will be defence companies who have a history of supplying mission critical solutions for national security and who base their control room solutions on secure and reliable technology arising from defence applications.
Flexibility
Flexibility is a key word for future control rooms, both in terms of new functionality and changes in organisation and responsibilities.
Many preparedness organisations have experienced proprietary, closed systems. Minor additions to the systems have been costly and difficult to implement. Often, the outcome has been not to upgrade, and not to utilise the system optimally – and what’s worse: Not utilising own resources optimally in daily operations. Experiences across Europe show that if the system can not be optimised, the result can be up to 50% higher resource requirements for carrying out daily operations.
Secure, flexible and scalable control room are key in the future. Control rooms will merge and split, new control rooms will be established as responsibilities change, requiring dynamically changing control room network and functionality. This can only be ensured by including an independent control room infrastructure that in its nature is designed for integration on secure standards.
The Danish Model
Denmark has chosen to integrate all actors of the national preparedness in one move. This means that besides the daily users (police, fire- and ambulance services) other actors like hospitals, homecare, defence and the national crisis staff can quickly attend an operation depending on the nature and size of the incident.
Before the roll-out of this new system began, Denmark was covered by more than 100 disparate analogue radio systems independently procured by each actor. This means that during larger incidents, the on-site commander may need to carry up to five different radios in the effort of coordinating the different actors.
The Danish Model, called SINE (an integration of the Tetra system and a common control room infrastructure) is based on an integration and infrastructure vendor supplying a secure and reliable system allowing all actors to work together, sharing data, positions and activities as required. While at the same time allowing each preparedness actor and local actor to have control room functionality optimised for their daily operations.
The Danish Model as supplied by the largest Danish defence and security company Terma A/S for the control room- and Motorola for the Tetra part, is based on an open, secure and reliable control room infrastructure, which gives all Danish national preparedness actors the opportunity to share the necessary data horizontally and vertically in daily operations and during large disasters. At the same time, the flexibility in choice of functionality is high for the individual preparedness actors.
The solution infrastructure part of the Danish Model is depicted in the Figure below.
Figure: Control room infrastructure principle based on the Danish control room model with integrated control rooms and data sharing across organisations.
More information
Market trends:
Anders Mathiasen, Master Thesis on control room trends and future
The Danish Model:
Official web site: www.sikkerhedsnet.dk (in Danish)
Supplier: www.terma.com – Integrated Systems / http://www.terma.com/index.dsp?page=2914#
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