Enabling distributed command and control with standards-based geospatial collaboration

Large-scale disasters present significant incident management challenges due to their size and complexity. Organizations often introduce distinct Concepts of Operations (CONOPs), resources, and tools. Collecting and disseminating real-time information across all responders and organizations presents a difficult, but urgent, technical problem, exemplified by the responses to the 2010 Deep Water Horizon oil spill and the 2011 9.0 magnitude earthquake and ensuing tsunami in Japan. Web-based application capabilities have matured significantly and can provide a distributed, feature-rich, and standards-based collaboration environment for First Responders. This paper describes the Next-Generation Incident Command System (NICS), formerly the Lincoln Distributed Disaster Response System (LDDRS), an open, non-proprietary, distributed, scalable, web-based situational awareness system for First Responders. NICS is developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory (MIT LL), in partnership with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), under the sponsorship of the Department of Homeland Security Science & Technology Directorate (S&T).