INKA - Interoperability between civil and military organizations in public protection and disaster relief management

In the last decade, Austria was increasingly affected by disasters like floods, mudslides and avalanches. Among the physical challenges during the relief work the coordination of the different authorities and organizations involved in disaster response operations is one of the main success factors for an effective and efficient assistance. In addition to the rescue organizations and the local or federal authorities, the Austrian Armed Forces play an important role in all phases of disaster relief and recovery. In contrast to civil crisis response organizations, military and other public security organizations and authorities are differently structured, base their operation on different patterns and use specialized ICT infrastructure. To these organizations, a cross-organizational coordination with non-military and non-governmental organizations poses a huge challenge. The aim of the project is to introduce an interoperability interface for authorities and organizations concerned with disaster management that supports standardized IT-supported information and communication channels amongst them. In particular, the integration of the Austrian Armed Forces in the aforementioned information network will help to improve the cross-organizational information provision end exchange. A prototype of a non-proprietary interface which serves as a node for bidirectional data exchange between military and non-military resources will be created. During the development of this prototype special requirements of military organizations for example concerning data protection will be covered. This will be done in due consideration of a potential transferability of the results on similar structured organizations in the future. In the analysis phase a systematic and standardized method will be used. This method includes the evaluation of the present situation in cross-organizational information exchange in disaster relief, the gathering of the requirements specifications on interoperability as well as the identification of the relevant improvements (levers) based on such an interoperability interface. The following main topics will be addressed during the analysis and design phase: organizational structure of stakeholders processes and levers communication and information o terminology o semantics o technology data security, data protection and legal requirements (especially communication issues) Following the analysis phase, the most important levers will be validated by an implementation of several Proof of Concepts based on use cases. It is planned to have one of these use cases based on the flooding during the summer of 2013 in Austria. After the successful validation, one of the levers (Proof of Concepts) will be implemented as a prototype interface. The resulting interoperability interface will then be integrated exemplarily in the processes and the technical infrastructure of the Austrian Armed Forces.