• San Diego State University (above)
• San Diego - Regional Terrorism Threat Assessment Center
• The San Diego County and City Police Departments
• SDPD Mobile Field Force (MFF)
• San Diego County Office of Emergency Services (SD OES)
• San Diego City Office of Homeland Security
• The San Diego Fire and Rescue Emergency Management
• The National Guard
• USMC
• The US Navy
• Naval Medical Centre/Naval Medical Health Centre
• Naval Environmental Preventative Medicine Unit-5
• FBI
• NCIS
• US Border Patrol
• BORSTAR
• US DoD
• Marine Aircraft Group 46

Following Pentagon orders, in July 2008, over 1500 personnel from various local, regional, state and federal entities will converge in San Diego to participate in a full scale, week-long real-play training event, named Golden Phoenix. The event includes simulation of a large avian flu outbreak, major regional fires, a terrorist driven bio-weapon attack and illegal border crossings. The training is aimed at facilitating better communication and collaboration between the civilian and military sectors in disaster relief scenarios. This joint civilian/military tactical exercise will trial technologies which can be set up on-the-fly to enable multiple agencies to collaborate during crises such as terrorist attacks or natural disasters like tsunamis and hurricanes. The architecture being followed is the National Incident Management System (NIMS) which provides a roadmap for organisations to work together during domestic incidents.

The response and authority to allocate resources to these crises is often distributed geographically and involve many different jurisdictions and organisations who may have never cooperated in the past, making collaboration difficult. Added to this are the diverse communication systems and protocols in use.

One of the main goals of this exercise is to tactically respond to crises using the existing systems and equipment organic to responding entities, despite the fact they may be disparate and proprietary. GPAC System^® overcomes interoperability issues with an Open Architecture which fully supports the NIMS model as a platform for integration, facilitating interagency communication.

With user friendly browser based interfaces and Web technology, GPAC System^® will facilitate real time voice, data and video communications between all of the disparate civilian and military responders whether they be fixed, mobile, on the ground or in the air.

Balfour Technologies LLC is also working with ETCorp LLC to integrate live sensor and camera data from GPAC Systems^® in the field with their fourDscape^® browser interface. This will deliver a virtual, 4D landscape of the crises with real time situational data at an advanced Command & Control centre at the San Diego State University Visualisation Lab.

When combined with the GPAC System^®, the Balfour fourDscape^® advanced visualization and time-based browsing capability gives the ability for customers to tie together and view multiple sites in both fixed, temporary and mobile locations that are dispersed over fields of operations that can be global while offering local data fusion, operation and ownership for each site.

The integration of GPAC System^® and fourDscape^® will improve the interoperability of agencies, will greatly improve situational awareness and will ultimately enable the disparate command posts to build a unified common operating picture for decision making.

Empirical data generated during the execution of this training exercise will be used to improve the outcomes of real life disasters in future.