Objectives of the service
TALED demonstrated an innovative integrated SATCOM/EO/GNSS platform to cope in RT/NRT with all kind of Fire incidents: Forest, Wild, Waste and Hazmat Fires. Designed to operate from detection to operational response, anywhere and 24/7, TALED originates from the need of institutional operators committed to improve the management of alerts, technical response, rescue and information. SMA Campania is a public company in charge of preparedness, information management and emergency response to all kind of fires. TALED provides SMA (as, in perspective, public/private/public-private companies with similar characteristics) with the possibility of remotely controlling and managing firefighting operations, in order to improve the workforce, aerial and terrestrial vehicles management. The service includes geographical information, as the tracking of the field operators, early warning of fires, and the prediction of short-term, fire & smoke evolution. Moreover TALED provides mixed SatCom/Local wireless connection in the operation scenario, often not covered by the terrestrial telecom services. TALED is designed to integrate and improve the current regional remotely accessible DSS, exploited by the various actors involved in firefighting. TALED target market is based, on one hand, to the actual business of SMA Campania, the service provider of the demonstration project (final customer of the service government of Campania Region), on the other hand to private service companies and public entities, that are in charge of the firefighting in other Italian and European regions.
Users and their needs
Three main users/actors, managing fire-alarms and associated emergencies, have been involved during the demonstration:
SMA Campania, a public-owned Campania Region company, manages environmental emergencies within the regional boundaries, including forest and waste fires. SMA is a partner and the main service provider of TALED.
CNVVF National Firemen Corp, is in charge of the prevention and the operational response to all kind of fires, both on ground and by fixed wing aircrafts and large helicopters. CNVVF is a partner of, and information provider to TALED.
Mountain Communities are in charge of managing local forest resources, including their defence against fires and natural threats. Mounts Lattari Natural Park is an interested user and potential customer.
Users express the needs to get:
- better and more effective coordination in alarm collection and dissemination.
- better and more effective on-field coordination during emergencies
- better safety of field operators
- improved efficiency of water bombing
- in-house capacity for mapping burnt areas
TALED answer those needs providing:
- geographic RT/NRT information: EO based maps and info’s coming from other existing early warning systems,
- connectivity to the field teams, even in absence of terrestrial network coverage,
- localization and safety devices to the field operators, even when operating far from the satellite link mobile station.
The country of the targeted users is Italy.
Service/ system concept
TALED System is composed by a Services Center and a number of “relocatable” stations on vehicles.
The Service Center has the following features:
- is an accessible system, having security filters, from WEB through browser. Is connected to Operation Center and several Relocatable stations.
- is an hub of heterogeneous data coming from different types of sources(SAT EO DATA, User and Fire operators Signalling, weather and CAP Data)
- Includes data fusion algorithms and simulation
- Is integrated in a decision support system (DSS)
The EDXL interface module allows interfacing with external systems, using Common Alerting Protocol (CAP). The DSS is designed to manage the information coming from the field (real-time) and those based on the EO data, and to be integrated with pre-existing DSS responsible for emergency management.
The Data Fusion module has the aim to influence and normalize different kinds of data in order to make them usable by the calculation modules to predict the evolution of the fire and smoke.
Each Fireline Relocatable Station, is equipped with a satellite telecommunication system for real-time communication with the center. The field operators are connected via a multi-channel terrestrial gateway, in order to send their position and transmit/receive alarm messages in case of danger.
Space Added Value
TALED deployed a SATCOM infrastructure allowing on site incident response teams to communicate with the Service Centre, considering that they operate “on demand” in emergency situations and have no time for on-site assessments to verify the radio-mobile coverage.
The analysis of the terrestrial networks coverage, and the real operations performed during the fire season 2018 (in mountain areas of Campania region, Italy) shows that the use of the Satellite Communication is needed.
“EO maps” module of TALED will provide some maps commonly used in the application domain (soil-use maps, DEM, etc) and Burn Scars Maps produced on-demand from the system. Data accessible from external services will be integrated with data collected on the field by the operators. Hot Spots are detected through the analysis of the images of the MSG-SEVIRI sensor. Kinematics algorithms are used in order to simulate Smoke plumes and fire evolution.
Localization and satellite navigation plays a key role in firefighting. Considerable time and financial resources are wasted because of mismanagement of the localization. Each TALED field-operator will be equipped with a personal GNSS tracking sensor device (GPS, Galileo, etc.) and the system will transmit its position with its operator code. The vehicles equipped with meteo station and TLC system, are equipped even with a location sensor. The location data will be used either to reach the area of interest for both the car-pointing of the satellite antenna.
Current Status
The Project Kick Off has been held in January 2017, BDR, in July 2017. The CDR, in November 2017, the Factory Acceptance Test meeting (FAT) took place on 14 March 2018, the SAT (Site Acceptance Test meeting) in September 2018.
Demonstration campaign started in June 2018 and last in late September 2018, at the end of the fire season.
The Final Review took place in ESTEC in October 2018.
