You are in:
Joined up down under
The BAPCO Journal looks at New Zealand's multi-agency command and control environment...
New Zealand has a population of some four million, 73 percent of whom live on its North Island, where the capital Wellington is located. The country’s 270,000 square kilometre land mass consists of two islands of approximately equal size, contained within 15,000 kilometres of coastline
The New Zealand Police is a unified national agency that serves the entire population. It employs over 7,300 sworn and some 2,500 non-sworn police officers and responds to over 1.7 million calls for service a year, of which approximately 600,000 are emergency and 1.1 million non-emergency.
The nation’s fire service – also unified, under the umbrella of the New Zealand Fire Service (NZFS) Commission - has around 1,700 full-time and 11,000 volunteer firefighters. NZFS receives around 250,000 calls a year of which some 107,000 are emergency and 143,000 non-emergency.
New Zealand’s Fire service had been using three different text-based systems at six locations, including its own in-house application. Its centres had no redundancy or mapping capability.
At the same time New Zealand Police was handling dispatch from 21 control rooms of which only three were computerised. The agency had outgrown the functionality of its existing computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system, which had no mapping function.
Blueprint for change
In response a strategic planning study was carried out with the objective to increase the effectiveness of New Zealand’s policing.
The study, known as ‘Policing 2000’ included a requirement to procure a state-of-the-art, computer-aided dispatch system that would improve delivery of police services to the public, enhance staff performance and safety and provide automated resource management tools. The system would also have to provide real-time data for resource deployment; allow integrated and automated command and control functions at remote policing sites; and have mapping capabilities.
After a competitive evaluation process Intergraph’s I/CAD command and control system was installed. Developed as a high performance engine for command and control, I/CAD is also a hub that integrates intelligent, real-time mapping with the processes of call handling, dispatching, records and information management, remote access and mobile data.
Today, Intergraph continues to enjoy a facilities management contract supporting both New Zealand Police and Fire Service for the complete administration of the system. New Zealand’s multiple-agency, shared control environment now consists of three communications centres spread across its two islands and located in the cities of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.
Combined control
New Zealand’s fire and police agencies have combined their control rooms and now share the same I/CAD database in a truly combined multi-agency environment. The system has the fire and police GUIs (graphical user interfaces) configured differently to accommodate their different day-to-day workflows - but each of its 110 workstations can be used for either fire or police control to allow overflow from one agency to another during periods of high traffic.
The system is also configured so that when all telephone lines into the Auckland centre are engaged incoming calls are automatically presented to the Wellington centre, where a calltaker creates the event and transfers it to the appropriate dispatcher in Auckland.
Importantly, each of the three centres has a replication process that allows it to provide back up for the others: in the case of the complete failure of a centre all its telephony systems, radio traffic and database information are transferred to another. In New Zealand there is a particular need for resilience and centre independence because of the tectonic fault line that cuts right through the middle of the national system at Wellington, underneath the control room.
To enable remote policing the system supports up to 600 concurrent users of Intergraph’s web-based I/NetViewer application, giving them remote access to incident, resource and dispatch information from more than 400 police stations nationwide.
New Zealand Fire has also implemented a data transfer interface to forward operational data to an in-house data warehouse. Within fifteen minutes of any event being closed, users at any of the New Zealand Fire Service’s 437 remote stations can access complete event information through a browser application, and update event attendance information on their Fire Incident Management System.
A status monitoring and calling system (SMACS) interface (using radio tone signalling) allows the status from police vehicles to automatically update the system. Radio control is integrated to allow screen-based control of the national Land Mobile Radio network that provides around 99 percent national geographical coverage. Screen-based control is also used to manage the system’s automatic call distribution (ACD) and call handling facilities.
