Situation, Use Case and User Requirement
During a concert in Rotterdam around 8 p.m, four gunmen who hid themselves in one building nearby opened fire on the crowd of over 1000 audience, leaving 20 people died and over hundred injured, they also held over 50 civilians as hostages. Police officers on site fought back but couldn’t match the firepower of terrorists. Also, earlier before, there was a chaos in train station. One man was making threats to passengers on the platform with sharp pieces of broken beer bottle in his hand. Emergency calls for both incidents were made by people on the scene and detailed information about shooting (number of shooters, their weapons, casualty status, location and time) was later reported by officers using police radio channel.
John was the commander of Special Intervention Service team of the police department in Rotterdam. Emergency calls about chaos in train station came in first and his team was immediately sent out to deal with it. When they arrived at the train station, they realized that the ‘terrorist’ on the platform who was waving sharp pieces of glass bottle was just a drunk man. It only took two members of fully-equipped team 5 minutes to detain the suspect. At that exact time, the emergency calls and radio report about mass shooting in open-air concert were received. Though extremely willing to help, John’s team didn’t bring adequate equipment to deal with this severe situation. They had to come back to police station, get reequipped and head to open-air concert again. Wasting time in this urgent situation really irritated John and his colleagues. What’s even worse: Vehicles of the team got stuck in the busy traffic and had to change routes several times.
John believes, SDSS is needed to improve efficiency of their work and special attention needed to be paid to following points:
- Which incident should be solved first with what kind of counter measures based on the information received from emergency call/police radio report?
- How many police officers from which police station needed to be deployed to solve certain incident?
- What is the shortest path between police stations/team and incident location based on structure of road network in the area and real-time traffic status?
Commander of the counter-terrorism center is sitting in the office. After he logs into the system, on-going terrorist incidents are shown on the screen as circles with their centroids. Centroid is exact location of one incident and circle is the buffer zone. Radius of the circle is decided by LOT (level of threat) and LOT is one input data from information center and it’s decided by all information about one incident (number of attackers, whether they are armed or not and casualty status). Some essential information icons are shown beside the incident circle to help commander choose which incident will be tackled first.
After choosing one incident from drop down list 'Select Incident', a table with detailed information of this incident is shown in the text box below. It includes LOT (Level Of Threat) of one incident, location and exact address of incident, the time when this incident happens and other important information, such as number of attackers, their weapons and casualty status. If commander decides that this incident has highest priority, he could continue switching to other tabs like roadblock, police station or report to solve this incident.
Under the tab Roads Block, he could enter a radius for 'danger zone' which should be blocked by police officers in order to prevent terrorists from escaping or to secure the site. After setting up radius, he clicks on the button 'Update Zone' and a dangerous zone (buffer) would be created around incident. Calculate Block Points will automatically detect intersection points between road network and this dangerous zone and return a list of points where roads could be blocked with their X, Y coordinates (all data sets are in EPSG 28992 CRS, so coordinate will be in meters, not decimal degree).
Under the tab Police Stations, Shortest Paths to Police Stations button will generate shortest path from each station to selected incident. Each station in this area is already marked on the map canvas with its special id icon. After this button is clicked, every shortest path is shown in the table below, in an ascending order from shortest to longest distance. If commander clicks on one of the path, that path is highlighted on the map. Besides the shortest path information, commander could also check detailed information of each police station. After clicking 'Select Police Station on the Screen', he could select one of the stations that he is interested in. When a station is chosen, he could click 'Show Information' button. Important data of this station, like the name of station, number of police officers on duty, vehicles available and equipment provided will be displayed in the table view below. Then commander could make decision, how many officers and vehicles to be deployed from this station to deal with the incident.
Under the tab of 'Report', ‘Generate Report' button will create a fully report with all the information during this process (information about incident, dangerous zone radius, possible road blocks with their coordinates, how many officers/vehicles from which station should be deployed on which path to incident. This report could be exported as a text or csv file and delivered to each police officer on the field.
The following functions are required by users of this SDSS:
- SDSS should be able to prioritize all incidents based on level of threat (LOT). LOT value is quantified from information gathered by emergency call center and police radio channel: number of terrorists, methods of attack, casualty status, location/time of incident. Those with high LOT value will be marked with high priority and need to be coped in the first place with more powerful counter methods, like deploying John’s team. Also, a buffer zone with relatively larger radius will be applied to avoid collateral damage and maintain the order. Those with low LOT value will have low priority and will be tackled by local police officer. A smaller buffer zone or no buffer zone is needed in this case. In this way, resources of police enforcement will be utilized. Important information like number of terrorists, whether they are armed or not, if there's a hostage situation and so on will be shown as icons with numbers beside each incident.
- SDSS should have up-to-date data of locations of all police stations and number of officers on duty (attendance sheet of police officers). Also, police enforcement already deployed on the field should be tracked. Based on shortest distance (least travel time) between police station and incident location, Commander in the office will make decisions on how many police officers from which station will be deployed to incident on which route.
- SDSS should be able to find the nearest path between police station/vehicle/officer and location of incident. Police vehicle/officer will be guided to incident location without wasting time in busy traffic.
- SDSS should be ‘bidirectional’. Commander in the center office make decisions mentioned above with the assistance from the system. Police officers on the field and civilians in danger could also use their end of system (Mission APP or SOS APP) to provide up-to-date information about incident. These information will be sent back to SDSS as input to augment the decision. Under this concept, field-end of system (Mission APP or SOS APP) should be fast and easy to use, with just a few buttons to send feedback information.
- For each incident, after it’s resolved, SDSS should mark it as ‘closed’ and remove it from the interface. A statistic report with all useful information, as casualty status, damage caused and police officers involved will be generated for post-crisis management and further case-study.
Below is the flow chart for our SDSS:
