The following Functional Areas are associated with the "County Public Safety Dispatch Centers" element.   Each functional area includes a brief description and a bulleted list of detailed functions.   The common icon provides a link to other systems in the region that include the same functional area.

 

Emergency Call-Taking

Provides interface to the emergency call-taking systems such as the Emergency Telecommunications System (e.g., 911) that correlate call information with emergencies reported by transit agencies, commercial vehicle operators, or other public safety agencie

• The center shall receive emergency notification information from other public safety agencies and present the possible incident information to the emergency system operator.
• The center shall coordinate, correlate, and verify all emergency inputs, including those identified based on external calls and internal analysis of security sensor and surveillance data, and assign each a level of confidence.
• The center shall forward the verified emergency information to the responding agency based on the location and nature of the emergency.

Emergency Dispatch (User Defined)

Dispatch emergency vehicles to incidents, tracking their location and status. Pertinent incident information is gathered and relayed to the responding units.

• The center shall coordinate response to incidents with other Emergency Management centers to ensure appropriate resources are dispatched and utilized.

Emergency Response Management

Strategic emergency planning and response capabilities and broad inter-agency interfaces to support large-scale incidents and disasters, commonly associated with Emergency Operations Centers.

• The center shall provide strategic emergency response capabilities such as that of an Emergency Operations Center for large-scale incidents and disasters.
• The center shall manage coordinated inter-agency responses to and recovery from large-scale emergencies. Such agencies include traffic management, transit, maintenance and construction management, rail operations, and other emergency management agencies.
• The center shall provide the capability to implement response plans and track progress through the incident by exchanging incident information and distributing response status to allied agencies.
• The center shall develop, coordinate with other agencies, and store emergency response plans.
• The center shall track the availability of resources (including vehicles, roadway cleanup?, etc.), request additional resources from traffic, maintenance, or other emergency centers if needed.
• The center shall allocate the appropriate emergency services, resources, and vehicle (s) to respond to incidents, and shall provide the capability to override the current allocation to suit the special needs of a current incident.
• The center shall receive event scheduling information from Event Promoters.
• The center shall receive hazardous materials incident information from commercial fleet operators.
• The center shall provide the capability to request the safe disabling of a commercial vehicle during a hazardous materials incident.
• The center shall provide the capability to request transit resource availability from transit centers for use during disaster and evacuation operations.
• The center shall assimilate the status of the transit, traffic, rail, maintenance, and other emergency center services and systems to create an overall transportation system status, and disseminate to each of these centers and the traveling public via traveler information providers.
• The center shall provide information to the media concerning the status of an emergency response.
• The center shall provide the capability for digitized map data to act as the background to the information presented to the emergency system operator.
• The center shall provide the capability for center personnel to provide inputs to the management of incidents, disasters and evacuations.

Emergency Data Collection

Collection and storage of information related to Emergency Management. For use by operations personnel or data archives in the region.

• The center shall collect emergency service data, emergency vehicle management data, emergency vehicle data, sensor and surveillance data, threat data, and incident data.
• The center shall receive and respond to requests from ITS Archives for either a catalog of the emergency management data or for the data itself.
• The center shall be able to produce sample products of the data available.
• The center shall assign quality control metrics and meta-data to be stored along with the data.

Incident Command

Tactical decision support, resource coordination, and communications integration among emergency management agencies for Incident Commands that are established by first responders to support local management of an incident.

• The center shall provide tactical decision support, resource coordination, and communications integration for Incident Commands that are established by first responders to support local management of an incident.
• The center shall provide incident command communications with public safety, emergency management, transportation, and other allied response agency centers.
• The center shall track and maintain resource information and action plans pertaining to the incident command.
• The center shall share incident command information with other public safety agencies including resource deployment status, hazardous material information, rail incident information, evacuation advice as well as traffic, road, and weather conditions.
• The center shall assess the status of responding emergency vehicles as part of an incident command.