Homeland security, car crashes and traffic incident data: Killing three birds with one IT architecture

Abstract

This brief article, a paper from the Traffic Records Forum, stresses that the method for receiving information about an emergency event should be the same whether it is a homeland security event, car crash, or other emergency incident. However, many emergency response agencies in the United States cannot send or receive incident data. The author maintains that the lack of a national interoperable communications infrastructure is a critical homeland security and emergency response problem. The author describes the National Emergency Alerting and Response Systems (NEARS) Initiative that features an emergency messaging framework using national emergency message standards, commercial information technologies, and shared facilitation services. The initiative promotes the interoperable framework, develops the service, and tests it for national implementation with actual deployments in several regions. The NEARS five-layer architecture enables the integration of data providers to data collectors. Data from devices in cars and trucks, incident data, or personal medical data can immediately be sent to those registered and authorized to receive this type of information. The author concludes that, through NEARS, traffic management systems as well as other discipline-specific systems can be integrated across the entire emergency response spectrum.