Incident Management Information Sharing (IMIS) Internet of Things (IoT) Architecture Engineering Report

The Incident Management Information Sharing (IMIS) Internet of Things (IoT) Pilot established the following objectives:

• Apply Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) principles and practices for collaborative development to existing standards and technology to prototype an IoT approach to sensor use for incident management.
• Employ an agile methodology for collaborative development of system designs, specifications, software and hardware components of an IoT-inspired IMIS sensor capability.
• Develop profiles and extensions of existing Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) and other distributed computing standards to provide a basis for future IMIS sensor and observation interoperability.
• Prototype capabilities documented in engineering reports and demonstrated in a realistic incident management scenario.

This pilot explores the emerging IoT enabled technologies as a means to provide first responders with better situational awareness and communications. Evolving IoT technologies now make it possible to establish basic network connectivity automatically with these sensors as soon as they are deployed. Basic connectivity is not enough, however. Actionable observations, analysis, alerts and predictions are needed. They must be easily discoverable and accessible from emergency response information systems and mobile devices to provide a dynamic and shared view of changing conditions. Standards are needed to make sensors easily and immediately identifiable, accessible, usable and useful across all teams (on-scene and Operation Centers) and information management platforms joining an incident response.