All Eyes on the Road

Transportation monitoring centers see greater efficiency with integrated solutions

• By Tony Lapolito
• Mar 12, 2007

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A significant piece of the nation’s infrastructure needing protection is the country’s transportation systems. Whether by land, sea or air, travelers trust that transportation organizations have made security their first priority. This puts increased pressure on transportation organizations to use every technological advantage available to protect the public.

Security Nerve Centers
The management operations center is a crucial tool in maintaining transportation infrastructure safety, while also serving as the nerve center where personnel monitor events in real time. Security technology streaming into management centers enables transportation officials to monitor the areas where people are traveling in order to maintain situational awareness 24/7 and respond when incidents occur.

Along with surveillance and monitoring technologies, transportation organizations use many other technologies, including GPS-equipped vehicles, road sensors, ramp meters, two-way video surveillance and license plate recognition systems. More recent technology advances, from IP-based digital video cameras and recorders, to RFID, GIS and analytics, are being fused with existing security methods in many operations centers.

In addition, the convergence of the physical security and surveillance network with the traditional IT networks is improving cross-organization communication and enabling efficient deployment and use of the network to provide better protection. Combined, these solutions provide the transportation management operations center with multiple streams of data that offer situational awareness from a bird’s-eye view as events unfold, enabling a more effective emergency response.

The Burden
With the massive amounts of data that filter through transportation management centers, the burden to investigate thousands of events can become unmanageable, and organizations can easily get overwhelmed. However, it is crucial that all of this data is collected and analyzed quickly to dictate the right response to a given security event. With people’s lives, important assets and critical infrastructure at risk, timing is everything.

To tackle this challenge, transportation organizations need tightly integrated systems to corroborate an event. One way to do this is to invest in a physical security information management (PSIM) solution. A PSIM solution is the technology and processes to collect, understand and respond to data relevant to security. It encapsulates the aggregation, visualization, systems control and tracking of security events to correlate information and produce the appropriate response to a situation.

PSIM products help to solve two fundamental problems. First, the solutions gather the most relevant and interesting data from the deluge of security information sources, including cameras, video analytics, access control event logs, intrusion sensors and HVAC. Second, PSIM products provide a comprehensive view into security system usage, performance, regulatory compliance and general security anomalies previously very difficult to obtain.

An effective PSIM solution supplies security teams with the necessary information to plan for and intelligently anticipate the next security threat; quickly detects when threats are beginning, alerting relevant personnel through a variety of communication channels; and coordinates a rapid response to threats by security and operations personnel.

Having the ability to manage, analyze and correlate data from both physical and IT security sources enables an organization to secure people, property and assets more effectively. And, for the personnel within the transportation management operations center, they can now focus exclusively on awareness, assessment and action.

Awareness
Awareness of a developing situation is the first step towards effective situation management. To accomplish this, transportation management operations centers need to leverage technology that enables personnel to see beyond what their eyesight lets them see. To increase the range of eyesight, the installation of cameras, sensors and other 24/7, real-time monitoring systems provide personnel with a better view of the world.

While the observation of a particular event may or may not be cause for concern, it’s the ability to correlate the data from all of the surveillance and security systems with relevant video that provides personnel with the whole picture. Correlation is a key component of the next step—assessment.

Assessment
Once personnel are aware of an event, they need to assess the security and required resources of the situation. Is this event one that requires a response? If so, what is the appropriate response?

This step is tricky. If the operations center immediately dispatches personnel to respond to an event, there is a possibility that they were unnecessarily deployed, thus consuming resources that may be needed to handle a real event.

To effectively assess an event, a transportation management operations center needs to analyze the data it is receiving from multiple sources quickly and correlate events automatically. The automatic correlation of information from all data sources coming into the traffic management operations center is crucial, as it enables personnel to focus exclusively on preventing, detecting, deterring and responding to a situation. Without correlation, operations centers are at an immediate disadvantage, as the inevitable lapses in response time can have a huge and negative impact on the public.

To correlate events automatically, the technology within the management operations center must be integrated. The challenge, however, is that most systems in place are not developed to integrate easily with other systems, and technology standards are not tied together. Successful transportation management operations centers have tied together all inherently disconnected systems with a PSIM solution that allows real-time communication from all subsystems.

By correlating data feeds and alarms from various sources, a PSIM solution can provide management operations center personnel with the context that enables the right response to real threats and security events, and disregard those that are false alarms or not real threats.

Action
When operations personnel identify an event, the next step is to take action. A crucial component of this step is collaboration; when an event unfolds, all resources needed to respond are rarely located in the same room.

Collaboration technology—highly-connected networks between facilities and mobile, wireless technologies—enables strong cooperation between the distributed traffic management operations centers and manpower poised to respond. Technology available to accomplish the task includes shared desktops, shared video feeds, video conferencing, live chat, integration with computer-aided dispatch and the dissemination of data to wireless devices that all contribute to real-time communication. These solutions enable critical information to be shared among the distributed manpower in a collaborative, real-time manner, providing a more effective way to deal with incidents.

In the handling of events, transportation organizations have protocols to follow, which dictate appropriate responses. The collaboration ensures that the proper action is taken in real time.

With more effective management of data and the true collaborative situational awareness that results, transportation organizations are better equipped to protect the public. Only when transportation management operations centers integrate various disparate systems with a PSIM solution will personnel glean the most relevant and interesting data from the deluge of security information sources. This operations center will achieve maximum efficiency, enabling quicker action and ultimately better protection of the transportation infrastructure and traveling public.