Exercise Control System

The Systems Integration Division's (SID) Manufacturing & Modeling Simulation Group (MSG) worked 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."

MSG developed a prototype of an Exercise Control System (ECS), a web based application that improves the efficiency of table top management exercises for the MapLab project. The ECS supports the creation, organization, and reuse of training scenarios. Those scenarios can then be used by the ECS during an exercise to dispatch messages to exercise control personnel. The ECS records participants feedback to facilitate the creation of generated reports, that can then be reviewed by exercise participants.

Partners

The Exercise Control System was developed by NIST in collaboration with the MapLab Project, San Francisco Communication. Several organizations also provided feed back and testing, such as:

• the San Jose Water Company
• the San Francisco Fire Department

The ECS was also used as a support tool during the following exercises:

• Golden Guardian 2007 Exercise
• Silver Sentinel 2008 Exercise
• US Resilience Summit 2008

 

Common Alerting Protocol

The ECS uses the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) as defined in the Oasis standard to represent alerts. As such, the ECS contains a complete implementation of CAP in the Java programming language and a rendering stylesheet to display alerts in an ergonomic way. The CAP implementation of the ECS can be found at the root of the source tree in the /edxl folder.