S&T Snapshots - Command Control & Interoperability

Security from on High

(November 2007) A police helicopter crew has just finished rescuing a damsel from peril and chasing down a bad guy on the run. Job well done, and it’s time to head back to HQ.

But there’s no time to kick back for the ride home. The area was just hit by a major storm, so a bridge needs to be inspected for any damage. There have also been reports about a suspicious truck parked outside a nearby power plant. Better check it out with a flyover.

It’s a typical day’s work for members of the Maryland State Police Aviation Command. They conduct both emergency response and law enforcement missions from a fleet of helicopters. Yet these return missions can be time-consuming and complex to keep track of, especially when you’re needed elsewhere in a hurry.

Thanks to funding from the DHS Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate, however, the Maryland State Police—and agencies like it across the Nation—now have a quicker, easier, and cheaper way to conduct these kinds of inspections. It’s called the Critical Infrastructure Inspection Management System (CIIMS). Developed at the State Police’s request by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, CIIMS will help flight crews efficiently manage their checks of vulnerable structures and sites, such as dams, bridges, and large industrial complexes.

Here’s how CIIMS works: Just before takeoff, a State Police flight crew loads data onto a handheld computer tablet, called an electronic flight bag. The data may include updated photos, coordinates, and maps for each critical infrastructure that needs to be inspected. This is all publicly available information, taken from Internet maps, navigation charts, and other sources.

In addition to the geographic data, the tablet is loaded with a series of questions that the inspections are designed to answer. While flying over the site, a crew member uses touch-screen controls on the tablet to answer the questions based on his or her observations. Questions like: “Do you see any cracks in the concrete at the base of the bridge?” or “Do you see a yellow truck parked outside the power plant?” After the crew lands back at State Police headquarters, the data on the tablet are uploaded and sent to the proper authorities (a state or Federal agency). From that point on, the inspections can be filed, managed, and prioritized electronically, saving time and resources while improving homeland security.

CIIMS is almost ready for primetime. The Maryland State Police will conduct further tests on CIIMS throughout the 2008 fiscal year and provide vital feedback to Johns Hopkins APL engineers, who will then tweak the system. Meanwhile, other state and local jurisdictions are expressing interest.

“Right now, we’re working with Maryland to really refine CIIMS, and then integrate the information collected by the tablets into a dependable reporting process,” says Herb Engle, who manages the CIIMS project for the S&T Directorate’s Command, Control, and Interoperability Division. “We’re hoping that we can start offering CIIMS to other states by the end of next year.”