For the Emergency Services at Horsens selecting the right solution for their control room, that would provide them with a full overview and detailed information, was paramount.
“In our control room, it is important for us to have an overview of our resources in relation to the tasks we need to solve,” says the Head of the control room at the Emergency Services at Horsens, Mette Raun Hollesen. The Emergency Services manage the control room for the newly established South-East Jutland Fire Department. “Furthermore, it is also important for us to give our personnel as detailed information as possible about the events and alarms we are sending to them.”, Mette Raun adds.
The Emergency Services have chosen to customise Innovative Security Manager™ (ISM) to meet their requirements. The chosen modules cover the entire process, from alarm reception to alarm dispatching to the vehicles. All this information is logged on each specific event.
Horsens’ control room has established its own ISM map server based on OSM (Open Street Map) data. As they are hosting the map server themselves, they can enrich the basic data with their own data. In this way, they can, for instance, post areas on fire on the map:
The map shows the seven areas of fire that the South-East Jutland Fire Department must cover. On the map they can also see positions of the different resources sending position data to the control room’s positioning server. This gives the operators a full overview of the situation.
If the operator wants more details about an address or a site, then he has the option to zoom in on the map and see more details, such as fire hydrants’ location or access roads, which also contain a link to a pdf document with a detailed description:
The event or alarm can be assigned automatically and/or manually to the desired resources. Most Emergency Services have chosen auto-instructions, which immediately call out the necessary resources.
The Emergency Services’ vehicles have Innovative’s interGATE4 app installed in an iPad. The app navigates the vehicle as quickly as possible to the site. The app uses the same base map and local layers used at the control room, as the iPad is connected to the map server and retrieves the so-called tiles. Initially, the iPad looks like this:
The app has a simple user interface. The status buttons on the right side of the screen are configured so that the Emergency Service can decide what to send to the control room.
When an alarm is sent to a vehicle, it will look like this on the iPad screen:
By pressing “drive”, the server immediately calculates the optimal route to the alarm point and shows the route on the screen. At the same time there is an oral navigation for the driver.
The alarm address can be seen at the top of the image. The red line in the centre of the screen is the optimal route for the vehicle. At the bottom of the picture it is possible to see the first place where the driver should turn.
Navigation can be controlled and “manipulated” by adding information to the map in advance that will affect the calculation of the optimal route to the site. For example, South-East Jutland Fire Department have placed an area in the centre of Horsens and indicated that in this area there is a speed limit of 40 km/h. This functionality offers infinite possibilities, as you can also indicate roadblocks, as “only valid for a specific period”.
When the vehicle arrives at the alarm site, the driver can zoom in on the map on the iPad and get more details about fire hydrants, status and dimensioning.
The alarm log is continuously filled with data, such as resources available, status of resources, etc. It gives the operator a complete overview of each alarm. When handling multiple simultaneous alarms, this information is highly valuable.
The log will be filled with data that may look like this:
