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Exercise Control System Press Release

During FY05-FY07 the MEL staff worked with San Francisco Communications to support the MapLab project. The goal of the MapLab project was "to design, develop, and demonstrate an operational prototype for the San Francisco Bay Area that enables critical infrastructure and key asset data and information sharing, analysis, and reporting in a heterogeneous environment with a system that is affordable, easy to use, and secure."

MEL's staff contributed to the MapLab effort by developing an Exercise Control System (ECS), a web based application that improves the efficiency of tabletop emergency response management exercises for the MapLab project. The ECS supports the creation, organization, and reuse of training scenarios. It then dispatches messages to exercise control personnel and records their feedback during the exercise execution, and generates reports that can be reviewed by the exercise participants. The ECS was developed by MEL, piloting the technology with ECS collaborators,  including the Golden Gate Safety Network (GGSN)/San Francisco Communications, San Francisco Fire Department, San Jose Water Company, and United States Secret Service.

The ECS was demonstrated at several tabletop exercises, such as the Golden Guardian 2007 Exercise, the Silver Sentinel 2008 Exercise, and the US Resilience Summit 2008 exercise. It was also presented at the National Science Foundation's Collaborative Expedition Workshop, and at the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA's) Disaster Management Interoperability Services (DMIS) group meeting.

Lately, San Francisco Communications, Carnegie Mellon University, and the United States Secret Service expressed interest in the ECS. To transfer technology, MEL has made the source code and project description information available to the public:
http://www.nist.gov/mel/msid/ecs.cfm
Created March 10, 2010, Updated October 5, 2010