EGERIS

European Generic Emergency Response Information System

An INFORMATION SOCIETY TECHNOLOGIES (IST) PROGRAMME

Contract no.: IST-2000-28345

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Project results

The EGERIS project is now terminated. In order to show and advertise the achievements of this project, a complete presentation of the trials which have been performed in the field is available on line and can also be distributed on CD-ROM.

Project objective(s)

Rationale of the project

European citizens are more and more aware of natural and industrial risks and call their authorities for a better protection against hazards and more efficient rescue operations in case of disaster. Working with several Civil Protection organisations, it appears that, for the moment, they have not benefited as much as other professionals from the new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Most of them are poorly equipped and they are now eager for making up in order to improve their overall efficiency. It is identified as a major priority. Another required key factor is interoperability, to able different emergency actors, possibly belonging to different regional or national European authorities to work jointly in case of large scale disaster.

System operational architecture

• Crews on-the-field equipped with portable devices (hand held terminals e.g. PDA with a GPS receiver);
• Mobile command centres installed in vehicles, close to the "hot spots" and co-ordinating several crews on-the-field; equipped with onboard devices like laptop computers and GPS receivers;
• Function Specific Control Room, hosting the local management and interfaces with Auxiliary functions (Technical & Scientific Support, Health Assistance, Damage Assessment, etc.), including reporting to upper level of co-ordination.

There is also a need of interconnecting upper layers of the system (application and service layers) to address applications that usually require much customisation. That’s why EGERIS introduces ‘intelligence’ in the architecture with a Knowledge Processing Kernel (KPK).

These elements are integrated in an Emergency Information System (EIS) over a communication infrastructure supporting voice and data exchange through a robust and standardised messaging service. EGERIS supports seamless transmission of orders, information, reports and requests between fixed nodes and mobile nodes.

An important requirement is that EGERIS is flexible and scalable enough to allow its function deployment to fit the particularities of encountered organisations and of course the technical possibilities of legacy systems to interface with (e.g. bandwidth, analogue or digital radio technology).

The OASIS project (http://www.oasis-fp6.org) is a follow up of the EGERIS project.

Participant list