Public Safety Hub - AIT

Public Safety Hub (PSH) has been developed by AIT Austrian Institute of Technology as a specialized interoperability hub for public safety services. The PSH enables the seamless, scalable, secure, and flexible exchange of information between federated systems of different organizations (both civil and defence IT systems). The PSH helps the stakeholders to improve the cooperation of organizations, and citizens by interlinking services and processes for an effective management of disasters and crisis. Within TeamAware, PSH will be brought to the edge to ensure a reliable and secure communication over instable network connections.

The PSH's federated design reflects the resilience and division of responsibilities needs of the CM and other public safety domains. This is especially reflected in the following design qualities:

Targeted emergency scenarios

Typical emergency scenarios that PSH targets are ones involving data exchange between multiple stakeholder organisations, such as in Public Warning and Alerting, Cross-Stakeholder Notifications, and assuring the seamless information exchange between command-and-control systems.

PSH is designed as a replacement for a generic Enterprise Service Bus (e.g. Apache Kafka) or custom made legacy information exchange solutions. It relates to Kafka in a similar way that a minibus relates to an ambulance. Both a minibus and an ambulance can transport goods and people, but a minibus is a generic solution that needs to be heavily customized for use as an ambulance, whereas an ambulance is specialised vehicle that provides exactly the features medical first responders need.

Similarly, both PSH and Kafka transport data, but Kafka is a fully generic solution that needs heavy customising, whereas PSH has been designed as a resilient data exchange solution for safety and security domain. Most notably, PSH aims to transport information reliably and securely between multiple organisations even in case of partial network outages, or temporary unavailability of some communication nodes.

Use within TeamAware

In the TeamAware architecture, PSH is used as a secure gateway that ensures data exchange between systems and organisations, whereas Kafka will be used to exchange the data between applications running on the same system. PSH will therefore be extended and improved in the following ways:

1. PSH-edge (or “PSH light”) version of the service will be developed to allow deploying of PSH on devices with limited computational power– most notably on sensor gateway devices.

2. Capability of PSH to gracefully handle network and system outages as well as data transport over unreliable channels will be extended to better support highly dynamic situations, e.g. data exchange over ad-hoc wireless networks where several networks with different capabilities and security levels may be available in parallel and some of them are likely to experience ruptures during emergency.

3. Further increase in security of data exchange, to meet the needs of network-centric safety and security applications using ad hoc and mashed wireless networks.

One of the key anticipated features to be implemented in TeamAware is a mechanism for handling the network degradation by prioritising the network traffic according to relative importance and urgency of the data packages.