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Airwave to demo new location tracking service for public safety organisations

Published: 
24 March, 2014

Airwave will be demonstrating its new location tracking service Collaborate for the first time today at the super session - Cycle of Contact: Agency to Agency (2 of 3).

Airwave is one of a number of companies participating in the super session, which is focusing on the cycle of contact for major incidents. The session will centre around a hypothetical incident scenario, demonstrating how the public get in touch with the emergency services and how this can be better managed with modern technology to better deliver a multi-agency interoperable response to major incidents.

Unlike other systems of this kind, Collaborate runs on the existing Airwave Network and Airwave service management portal. It provides a secure platform for police forces, fire and rescue services and ambulance trusts to share their GPS location data without the need for new hardware or software.

‘It delivers two key new capabilities to customers’, explains Airwave’s Head of Smarter Network Solutions Henry Kay, ‘the first of which is a multi-agency view of resources. With the Airwave Network we can provide GPS details for not only one force’s own resources but also those of neighbouring services and other agencies. This provides a more complete operating picture and allows commanders to make more efficient decisions, respond faster and better manage major incidents. We will be showing a live demo of how this works by displaying resources from different organisations on a geographic information system (GIS) mapping system.’

The other new capability offered by Collaborate is big data analytics, providing historic and near real-time information on resources being deployed. ‘For major incidents, this means that if resources are coming in on mutual aid from neighbouring forces or agencies, commanders can view their location as well as information about shared specialist resources – for example, fire arms units or specialist fire equipment - which can now be managed regionally or nationally.’

Airwave is already using this technology in day-to-day operations, with an ongoing project with Sussex Police. The force was concerned about the number of return visits made by officers to the station between incidents. ‘We’ve produced dashboards showing near real-time analytics about which resources are returning and how far away they have been, providing useful data about how these resources are deployed.’

Henry also cites the prevalence of the ‘soft borders’ concept as another situation where Collaborate could be usefully deployed. ‘The ability to see which resource is closest to an incident, even if that resource is in a neighbouring force or agency, equips the emergency services with the ability to achieve faster response times to local as well as major incidents.’

If you want to find out more about Collaborate, the super session Cycle of Contact: Agency to Agency (2 of 3) takes place at 10:00 today, or visit Airwave on stand F24 throughout the show for a full demonstration.




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