112 Dispatch Centre
Nowadays, the SAMUR-Civil Protection Dispatch Centre is situated in two physical locations: at the MADRID 112 headquarters, where citizen requests received through the 112 emergency telephone line are managed and at the CISEM Comprehensive Security and Emergency Center, where requests from institutional notification agencies such as the municipal police, the Madrid City Council Fire Department, mobility officers, and security services for the Metro, train network, airport etc. are managed.
It is worth noting that we have pioneered the integration of an emergency resource management application in Europe. This application is included in the Madrid City Council's TETRA digital trunking communications system, of which we are users. Accordingly, the calls are assigned to ambulances and operational bases through data transmission instead of voice, therefore saving many hours of radio channel use. Many functionalities have been added to this system so that currently both the sending of activations from the Dispatch Centre to the ambulances as well as the sending of operational statuses from the ambulances to the Dispatch Centre are carried out via data. All this is immediately included in the resource management application.
Hardware elements
Currently, part of the Dispatch Centre located in MADRID 112 uses its Ethernet network segment which uses a high-capacity server installed there, operating in cluster mode and eight stations:
Three of the stations function as radio command and control stations.
Four of the stations function as telephone workstations.
A station functions as a system administrator.
Each radio station is associated with a GIS (Geographic Information System) of the municipality of Madrid, with the alphanumeric street map and toponymy database from the Municipal Urban Planning Department.
At the MADRID 112 headquarters a switching matrix is used and its CTI for communications integration. At the CISEM, SAMUR has four operating stations dependent on a different server than that of MADRID 112. Accordingly, the Dispatch Centre has a real-time BACK-UP, allowing both centres to handle service operations independently. Furthermore, at the CISEM a modern digital communications integration system called VAS (Voice Alerting System) is used. Both systems have a superior capacity and versatility, enabling the easy management of 20 telephone lines and the 2 different communication systems available, with considerable simplicity and efficiency.
Between the Dispatch Centre and the SAMUR-Civil Protection Headquarters, there is a fibre optic link and two routers, so that, although separated in practice, the two existing networks function as a single network.
Software elements
All stations, both telephone and radio are loaded with the intervention management application called ETS (Emergency Treatment System). This very visual and intuitive application is designed in Visual Basic and, as mentioned, is integrated with the Madrid City Council's TETRA digital radio communications network. It has two different interfaces:
Telephone service: where the addresses are filtered in a manner identical to that of the Municipal Police, using the alphanumeric street map of the Municipal Urban Planning Department. Incidents are subsequently coded using a logical tree system with an interesting help menu.
Resource management: which facilitates the simple allocation of the available resources’ notifications, enabling a quick and easy follow-up of interventions.