The newly formed International Critical Control Rooms Alliance (ICCRA), an independent working group of the Tetra and Critical Communications Association (TCCA), has launched its first project – to drive the standardisation of critical control room technical interfaces for public protection and disaster relief (PPDR) organisations.
There is currently no common interface standard between the telecoms solution – whatever it may be – and the PPDR organisation. This has led to a myriad of proprietary approaches, which in some cases can result in the sub-performance of PPDR operations. “Advances in ICT and related citizen expectation assume that PPDR organisations must surely possess the capability to receive and deliver information within their community freely and quickly to deliver the best possible service. This is not the case,” said ICCRA chair Peter Prater.
“This first ICCRA project is concerned with driving the development of essential standards for interfacing critical control rooms – particularly those related to PPDR operations – with each other, their international colleagues and the telecoms solutions on which they rely.”
In this first round of standardisation, ICCRA will focus on the following:
- Emergency call handling and management - the ability to pass calls:
â—¦ between emergency call receipt centres and critical control rooms
â—¦ between emergency call receipt centres
â—¦ between critical control rooms - Incident transfer – transferring incident forms and other data messages between critical control rooms
- Interface between Mission Critical LTE and critical control room processes such as Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) and Integrated Control Room Systems (ICCS)
If you are interested in contributing to the project or learning from it, please contact ICCRA at standards@iccraonline.com.
Participation in ICCRA is open to any person or organisation engaged in the provision or support of a critical control room service, across all sectors.
