NIST Exercise Control System Wins Approval at Golden Guardian 2007
For more than a year, MSG staff have been working with San Francisco Communications to support the MapLab project. The goal of the MapLab project is "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."
NIST's objective is to develop an Exercise Control System (ECS), a web-based application that improves the efficiency of table top management exercises for the MapLab project. During exercise development, the ECS supports the creation, organization, and reuse of training scenarios. During exercise execution, the ECS dispatches messages to exercise control personnel and records their feedback. After the exercise, the ECS generates reports that can be reviewed by the exercise participants. The development of the ECS has been led by Charles McLean and Damien Bertot of the Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory (MEL). Other MEL participants include Guillaume Radde, Yan Luo, Benjamin Raverdy, and Tina Lee.
The ECS was used in the Golden Guardian 2007 Exercise, held as part of the California Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program, on November 1, 2007. Damien Bertot received an appreciation email from David Coggeshall of the MapLab Project, San Francisco Communications: "Thank you very much for your support of our Golden Guardian 2007 Exercise on November 1. We were able to install your ECS application on the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center server and run it during the exercise without any major problems. Most of our difficulties stem from the server requirements which we did not adequately anticipate. Nonetheless, we were able to get a version running in time so that it could be viewed by several key participants...."
Since the ECS was successfully used to run the Golden Guardian 2007 Exercise, the San Francisco Fire Department and the Santa Clara County Fire Department are considering the ECS for use.
In addition to supporting the Golden Guardian 2007 Exercise, MEL also participated in the 2007 Homeland Security S&T Stakeholders Conference to present a map-based Inject management Application for supporting the COMCARE Emergency Response Alliance (COMCARE) projects, including the MapLab project. COMCARE is a non-profit national advocacy organization of over 100 members; all dedicated to advancing emergency communications.