Common Operating Picture

The complex environment of warfare and mass casualty incidents produces multiple environmental hazards that can harm personnel and prevent the accomplishment of military and public safety objectives. The renewed use of chemical weapons in Syria, contaminated water in military on continental United States (CONUS) bases, and a deadly fourth generation agent (FGA) employment in United Kingdom illustrate the continuing evolution of methods and hazards. The lack...

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Battlefield, disaster response, and public safety sustainment is both art and science; it's about synchronizing, integrating, and transporting commodities in a highly "just-in-time" manner to provide maneuver and incident commanders with freedom of action, extended operational reach, and prolonged endurance. As it turns out, the "science" of sustainment is not terribly difficult as it is grounded in basic math and computation, based on real-time time...

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Every day,  our physical and digital worlds become increasingly intertwined, presenting huge opportunities for investments in a future of continuous and lasting change.  This is true of Smart Cities, but also intelligent retail and smarter buildings.  This digitalization of the cyber-physical world is especially promising for municipalities to uncover opportunities and overcome challenges specific to the ever present goal of creating "safer cities".  Critical to...

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No matter what the public safety networks look like in 20 years, they are sure to have core capabilities grounded in location-based services.  A critical component of any successful rescue operation is time.  Decision cycle time can be optimized by having the precise location of buildings, core services, emergency service resources, and disaster relief sites. This information is critical to disaster relief teams and public...

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The relationship between weather and emergency management (not to mention emergency preparedness) is fundamental and can be quite complicated. Weather causes many of the disasters that require an emergency response, yet awareness of conditions is essential for management of incidents unrelated to weather as the cause. For sure, meteorological awareness can have a profound effect managing the extent of destruction to life and property to...

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Ask any soldier or first responder and they will tell you of the importance of shared tactical video for decision-making during edge operations. Drones can now be cued to launch in real-time for overwatch. Military working dogs routinely carry low light infrared imagers that enable off-leash shared awareness for what the dog sees even though he is 200 meters forward. Video is core to intelligence...

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Much like military conflict, manmade and natural disasters present similar challenges of uncertainty, complexity and variability. These time-constrained and chaotic decision environments require rapid adaptation and an ability to pivot quickly to changes in the environment. The complexity of the event, coupled with time compressed decision space and the severity of the potential consequences, creates conditions that are unforgiving of error. Given the austere and...

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Ask anyone who has responded to a natural or manmade disaster and they will tell you, these events create the mother of all non-predictive inter-agency mashups. The multitude of agencies responding from outside of the incident area creates a need for hyperlocal services that assist in navigation, but also enable the finding and discovery of resources in the affected area of operation that can be...

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It's that time of year. Every fire season, millions of acres across the world burn during wildland fire events. Worse, between 2000 - 2019 alone, more than 400 wildland firefighters lost their lives fighting these fires while protecting civilians, homes, and forests. While the hazards faced on the fire line can include burnovers/entrapments, heat-related illnesses and injuries, smoke inhalation, vehicle-related injuries (including aircraft), slips, trips,...

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Blueforce has been working diligently over the last six months on our new BlueforceTACTICAL and BlueforceEDGE ports to Linux. Much of our work has been in developing next generation Blueforce Plugins for the Linux platform that support and extend capability to shrink the footprint, but also the Space, Weight, and Power (SWaP) requirements such that the code can run on “System on Chip” containers, but...

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