Profiling Approach for the Interoperability of Command and Control Systems in Emergency Management: Pilot Scenario and Application

In order to manage emergencies, crises and disasters effectively, different organizations with their Command & Control (C2) and Sensing Systems have to cooperate and constantly exchange and share data and information. In other words, territorial emergency management requires a cross-organisational, cross-domain, cross-level interoperability between the involved C2 and Sensing Systems. Although individual standards and specifications are usually adopted in C2 and Sensing Systems separately, there is no common, unified interoperability specification to be adopted in an emergency situation, which creates a crucial interoperability challenge for all the involved organisations. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel and practical profiling approach, which aims at achieving seamless interoperability of C2 and Sensing Systems in emergency management. Unlike the conventional profiling approach, which addresses only first three layers of interoperability stack, the profiling approach introduced in this paper involves all the layers of the communication stack in the security field. The work presented in this paper examine in particular the aspects relating to the testing of the project in the region of Puglia and interfacing with information systems of local authorities.