IEM Supports Eastern States in Improving Interoperability of Incident Management Systems During Disasters

Recent Demonstration Shows Successful Proof-of-Concept for IEM’s Message Brokering Prototype

Research Triangle Park, NC, April 30, 2014 – Working with the NY-NJ-CT-PA Regional Logistics Program, global security consulting firm IEM helped develop a mechanism for interoperability among local, state, and federal incident management systems that enables more effective receipt, sharing, and tracking of resources as they are requested and deployed during a disaster. The result is a demonstration of capability that helps to get the right resources to the right place at the right time.

Currently, four different incident management systems are employed in the NY-NJ-CT-PA RCPT Region: Disaster LAN (DLAN), E Team, Knowledge Center, and WebEOC. In a demonstration held in late March, the Regional Logistics Program and IEM demonstrated a successful proof-of-concept for a prototype message brokering system that converts incoming/outgoing messages to the common Emergency Data Exchange Language Resource Messaging (EDXL-RM) format, an Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) international standard. The prototype enabled DLAN and E Team to successfully communicate with each other despite their system technology differences.

Because relief personnel, supplies, and equipment can be unnecessarily delayed when local, state, and federal governments use differing incident logistics management systems that do not communicate with each other, the NY-NJ-CT-PA Regional Logistics Program has been seeking a solution to provide interoperability among systems and thereby improve information sharing and incident response in the region.

IEM developed a prototype message brokering system that enabled interoperability among the incident management systems and then demonstrated the interoperability potential in an event that included planning partners from across the NY-NJ-CT-PA RCPT Region. The demonstration showed that IEM’s message brokering prototype can be used to allow for the successful passing of resource request data between local, state, and federal incident management systems, using EDXL-RM as the common messaging standard, and can automate information logging and sharing.