Adequate COP environment

Endorsed by
DRIVER+
STAMINA
Motivation

Lack of a “Common Operational Picture” environment to integrate data sources and calculation results from different models that are crucial for  decision making process from the perspective of the incident commander.

Potential Solutions
Following solutions could be addressing this gap.

A Common Operational Picture (COP) is a particular type of situation supported by a Command and Control system which is “established and maintained by gathering, collating, synthesizing, and disseminating incident information to all appropriate parties.” (21).

The main challenges lay in the amount of data and therefore the selection the most relevant data for incident ; and the format of data (disparate data collection, integration and analysis). The information needs to be customised to the exact needs and discipline-specific requirements to accommodate the variety of users. Real time is crucial.

The objectives of a COP are ultimately to increase situational awareness and to support real-time decision making.


References in the literature: This is rather well identified by most studies on management gaps. They tend to focus on the management of large amount of data and ability to merge data with different formats.

Rationale & related CM function(s)

Models to assess dynamics of chemical and radiological threats exist, but provide results in different formats (qualitative descriptions, tabular data, numerical data, geospatial data, etc.). This makes it difficult to effectively use them in an integrated COP system.
Data gathering and integration in the COP is still inadequate. E.g. it is difficult to do it on the fly when EU Civil Protection Mechanism modules are deployed.
An universal tool integrating results from different models, enabling comparison in real-time, in a unique environment is seen as necessary, e.g. to support EUCPM. The outputs of such a tool should be easy and quick to interpret by incident commander (visualisation).
Provenance
DRIVER+ D922.11 List of CM gaps, gap 3, pp 38-39
eu Portfolio of Solutions web site has been initially developed in the scope of DRIVER+ project. Today, the service is managed by AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH., for the benefit of the European Management. PoS is endorsed and supported by the Disaster Competence Network Austria (DCNA) as well as by the STAMINA and TeamAware H2020 projects.