Airport Business

OCT 2014

The airport professional's source for airport industry news, articles, events, and careers.

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AIRPORT OPERATIONS TECH 12 airportbusiness October 2014 By Ronnie L. Garrett Command and Control Los Angeles International Airport extends incident management to field operations with the NICE Situator Web Application But when all the data goes to a central location, and there are 40 or so people in the field to share information with, key incident details might be missed—a fact that's simply unacceptable in a mission-critical environment like an airport. To ensure critical information readily flowed between its control center and airport oper- ations employees, Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), which serves 66.7 million pas- sengers annually, built a new operations center, dubbed the Airport Resource Coordination Center or ARCC, on the western side of the airport in 2011 The airport equipped its ARCC with NICE Situator, which enabled it to integrate infor- mation from various security and operational systems, including video surveillance, CCTV and access control, and generate automated, adaptive response plans for personnel in the field to follow. But though information sharing was vastly improved through these efforts, airport officials wanted more. "It received a lot of input from CCTV and our active control devices, but in many ways—even with all that input coming in—you don't get a lot of eyes on the ground feeding right into the ARCC," says Dom Nessi, executive director and chief information officer at Los Angeles World Airports. In May 2012, the airport sought to expand this system to ensure the boots on the ground (there are up to 45 operations employees roam- ing the airport with mobile devices in hand at all times) received key information in real time. The airport selected NICE Systems and AECOM Technology Corporation to aid in this effort by extending the airport's situation management capabilities from the control room to the field. "The goal was to integrate the NICE Situator Control Room with the air- port's Geographic Information System (GIS), which includes their physical infrastructure data about LAX, and put it in the hands of users in the field to extend it beyond just a command-and-control product," says Kevin Carlson, vice president of Aviation Systems for AECOM. In September, the airport reaped the fruit of this two-year development effort when it deployed the NICE Situator Enterprise Geographical Information System (EGIS) Web application, which enables field personnel to view all open security and operational incidents in Situator and log new incidents from their tablet computers. This system creates a shared environment for managing incidents, leading to better collaboration between teams, increased situational awareness for all operators and more effective responses, according to Nessi. "Airport operations staff at LAX can now use iPads in the field to collaborate as they manage incidents, view critical information about the facility and the infrastructure, and communicate with the command center without radio," says Carlson. Nessi stresses the NICE solution allows the airport to transform the way it manages safety, security and operations. "Based on our W illiam Shakespeare penned "that a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet." A similar tale could be spun for the airport control room. Though the name of this operational epicenter var- ies from airport to airport, it is the hub for all that goes on inside the fence. "It is the method by which airports share a common operating pic- ture between those in the field and those in the control room," says Chris Wooten, executive vice president of NICE Systems' Security Group. "The goal was to integrate the NICE Situator Control Room with the airport's Geographic Information System (GIS) … and put it in the hands of users in the field." KEVIN CARLSON, VICE PRESIDENT, AVIATION SYSTEMS, AECOM

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