The organization and coordination of rescue teams acting out on the field are crucial issues for public bodies and institutions which have to guarantee help and support both in time of peace and in the event of a crisis. A perfect synergy of the rescue parties enables efficient intervention during crises, by reducing intervention times and optimising human resources.

The system described in this presentation has been developed for the Operations Room of the Siena Province Civil Protection Organization, working primarily in emergency situations. It allows the visualization and the real-time tracking of the rescue parties acting out on the field, through an “Intelligent Display Panel” installed in the Operations Room. The localization is visualized on Geographic Information System (GIS) maps and it can be implemented both through dedicated software, allowing high analysis capabilities, and through web browsers, enabling remote visualizations. The rescue teams are equipped with hand-held devices with networking capabilities, in order to communicate with the Operations Room and to report the occurrence of certain critical events in real time (i.e. blocked road, landslide, accident, etc.), thus allowing the coordination and distribution of these data to all the other rescue parties.

The rescue services use Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) with integrated GPS receivers. PDAs generate and deliver tracking messages to the server located in the Operations Room. In this operations room, the system allows the visualization and tracking of rescue team positions on GIS maps, through an Intelligent Display Panel (IDP). Through a dedicated software, the IDP enables accurate analyses of the emergency situation. The crisis zone with the location of rescue teams can also be displayed via internet with a common browser, allowing decisional authorities to actively participate in the choice of the intervention means, even if they are not physically present in the Operations Room. Rescue team positions can be stored in a database, enabling a post-crisis analysis of actions and intervention modalities.

The system allows real-time localization and advanced statistical and play-back functionalities and it can also be utilized in more “static” applications, such as the detection of environmental pollution or the monitoring of particular climatic conditions.

Further development efforts are focused towards other transmission systems (e.g., TETRA, UMTS, ad hoc networks) in order to cope with disconnections due to poor or inexistent GPRS signal coverage. The UMTS system, providing a greater bandwidth, would allow the operators, through their PDA browser, to access the tracking data and to see the location of their colleagues, in real-time.

The first 50 clients have been delivered and the Operations Room is functional. Experimentations and tests are being performed in Siena with the cooperation of the Provincial Police and the Siena Civil Protection Organization.