Dutch nation-wide crisis management system LCMS
Overview
LCMS is a nation-wide crisis management system used in The Netherlands to maintain and share a common operational picture supporting large-scale crisis management collaboration. LCMS is used by all 25 safety regions, the majority of the waterboards, Rijkswaterstaat, an increasing number of emergency health care organisations, the Royal Military Police organisation and some drinking water providers. LCMS supports netcentric collaboration, which is a way of working in which clear agreements are made about sharing information so that decision-making under (crisis) circumstances is always based on an up-to-date, consistent and common operational picture. LCMS is a web based collaboration environment with a very high level of availability. The environment can be used to share information within an organisation as well as between organisations. It supports maintaining and sharing geographical as well as textual pictures. An overview of the technical set-up of one instance of the LCMS system (e.g., the LCMS system for the waterboards) is depicted below.
Provided Functionalities
The situational picture
The situational picture is the heart of LCMS. This picture gives a quick overview of all relevant information from and for all collaborating teams and organisations. It consists of a geographical part and a textual part.
LCMS Text can be used to compose and arrange a coherent, clear and actual situational picture. As a reminder for the information managers, the default content of the textual fields includes a number of themes that are typically relevant in crisis management. Think of meteorological information, safety of emergency workers and victim overview for example.
LCMS Plot can be used to maintain a geographical picture of the situation. For each participating team a separate drawing layer is available.
A web-based geographical viewer is part of LCMS Text. This viewer can be used to display relevant map layers and plot layers.
The Geo4OOV server supplies LCMS – as well as an increasing number of other systems – with non-dynamic geographical data. LCMS users can find virtually anything they need.
LCMS mobile supports coordination of large-scale response to wild-fires. LCMS mobile complements
the visualisation of incident location, firefighting locations, fire control lines, water extraction points
with functionality for command and control of units, vehicles and materiel. Unit commanders are supported
with real-time visualisation of actual vehicle locations, deployment locations and logistic points of interest
LCMS mobile makes use of Ad-Hoc Routers (AHR) to maintain a secure connection with the Internet and the central LCMS servers. The AHRs automatically set up a local field network in which all vehicles are included. This has the advantage that just one of the vehicles needs a 4G, 3G or satellite connection to provide all vehicles with an Internet connection.
