Unified Incident Command and Decision Support (UICDS) A Department of Homeland Security Initiative in Information Sharing

Following a year-long architecture development project, the Department of Homeland Security, Directorate of Science and Technology awarded a Phase H contract to prototype and pilot the Unified Incident Command and Decision Support (UICDS) middleware framework. UICDS is an initiative to architect, develop, and deploy a "middleware" foundation that enables ubiquitous information exchange among existing government and commercial incident management technologies for the purpose of creating role-based, incident-specific situational awareness and information sharing. This paper describes the architecture, prototype development, and demonstrations that are leading to UICDS providing decision support on existing end-user digital devices to individuals, teams, and organizations that engage in risk prevention, protection, response, and recovery.