Mobile Tracking and Location Awareness in Disaster Relief and Humanitarian Assistance Situations.

摘要

Situational awareness is one of the most important factors that commanders consider in any type of mission, be it humanitarian relief, disaster recovery, or armed conflict. Through the past several decades, with the use of technology, we have been able to develop systems that help improve the commander's situational awareness of the mission. However, one of the major problems with this advance in technology in general is that every organization uses a different technology to communicate, which causes interoperability issues and lack of a Common Operational Picture (COP) among them. Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) equipment that is relatively inexpensive, easily obtainable, simple to operate, and rapidly distributable to different organizations can help bridge this gap in overall mission situational awareness. The goal of this research is to explore the effective implementation of Android-based devices to track disaster team members and the location of significant activities/equipment graphically through the use of GPS, Google Maps, and custom overlays. This will increase situational awareness, and thereby create a COP to assist in disaster relief and humanitarian assistance efforts.