C
OMPUTER
A
IDED
D
ISPATCH
S
YSTEM
Senior Sergeant Neil Preston
and
Ralph Saunders
Queensland Police Service
Queensland Police Service Command and Control System
THIS PAPER DETAILS LOCAL AUSTRALIAN DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMEN -tation of a $2.5 million police Command and Control System and the practical application of the Computer Assisted Dispatch System as developed by the Queensland Police Service. The system uses Hewlett Packard 9000 Series minicomputers and Model 300/400t workstation screens.
Command and Control is the system designed for normal day-to-day operations of the Queensland Police Communications Centre. It primarily accommodates police assistance calls from the public, but also caters for minor and major incidents, such as gas leaks and airport terrorist action. The system is used in conjunction with the telephone network, the police radio network and other connected computerised services. Important features include the ability to provide management information, utility in crime targeting purposes, and enhanced officer safety features.
The system, in its simplest form, allows operators to record new jobs, verify address locality from a UBD street registry, review address history for officer safety, check for resource availability, and then assign a police patrol to the task or place the task on a job queue for subsequent action. Job tracking, patrol status, radio areas, rosters, messages, management information and reporting are some of the other features of the Command and Control system.
changes, all outstanding work can be handed over to the new operator, and messages may be set for the new operator to read at sign-on stage.
Incorporating Computer Aided Dispatch
This segment will address the development of Command and Control incorporating Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) from the aspect of a user representative. It will also comment on the old manual system—the system CAD replaced—and outline some of the reasons for adopting CAD.
Work in the communications room in the previous Queensland Police Service headquarter involved the use of a manual card-recording system. This system required individuals to write and time-stamp entries on a cardboard jobcard. This card was then passed to other operators by means of an endless conveyor belt. The manual system centred around three specific functions: being a call-taker or telephone interceptor, a supervisor and communications coordinator, and a radio operator. The telephone interceptor had no technical aids at his disposal, while the communications coordinator and the radio operator had access to a simple patrol-status computer which gave information centred around patrol status movements as updated by the radio operator.
Why the new system?
The inefficiencies of the old system are obvious. Management information was non-existent, the old vehicle-status computer equipment was obsolete, and the computer system could not be easily changed. Police were soon to move to a new headquarters and this seemed to be the most opportune time to embark upon a course of a full Command and Control system incorporating CAD.
In 1988—at the time the analysis of the old manual operating system and subsequent setting of specifications for the new system was being undertaken—Senior Sergeant Neil Preston joined the CAD team in the capacity of user representative. At the completion of the analysis and specification phase, Senior Sergeant Preston then became directly involved in the evaluation of some twelve tendered CAD programs offered to the Queensland Police Service. (At this juncture, there was an inability to modify existing procedures to accommodate a proposed CAD system as the Queensland Police Service was being examined by the Fitzgerald Commission of Inquiry.)
These evaluations concluded that none of the CAD systems on tender met the Queensland Police Service requirements exactly. This, of course, was to be expected. What had not been expected was the degree of fit of those offered and the degree of difficulty and expense of modifications to meet those requirements. The fit ranged from an estimated 30 per cent to 85 per cent but the bulk of systems rested in the 50 per cent to 60 per cent range. The system which came close to the needs of the Queensland Police Force was from an American supplier. However, this system was not accepted because:
• the supplier had no Australian backup or representation;
• licence fees applied for each location the program was to be sited;
• high cost of initial change and any further changes could only be carried out by the supplier;
• copyright would always remain with the supplier regardless of the extent of the changes; and
• other technical reasons.
It was interesting to note that no two CAD systems offered for evaluation could be considered the same.
For several reasons, it was decided that an existing CAD system would not be utilised, but that the Queensland Police Service would undertake to write a CAD program specific to its requirements.
The plan
In May 1989, the Queensland Police Service made the decision to accept the solution proposed by Telecom Australia. This solution involved:
• the Queensland Police Service;
• Telecom (to be engaged as the Prime Contractors and Project Managers);
• Hewlett Packard (to provide the operating systems, LAN software and
resilient hardware);
• BHA Computer (system builders and system integrators);
• Sybase (to provide relational database software); and KPMG (to provide system and organisational reviews).
Subsequent to the initial specifications, prototyping commenced in September 1988. This opportunity was taken to incorporate into the prototype computer solutions to some of the inherent problems associated with the old manual system, the most prominent of those problems being:
Allocation of resources
• suggested patrols report: the allocation of resources based on geographic location had always presented extreme difficulty in the old manual system.
Addresses
• address history: the ability to gain information regarding prior police attendances at specific addresses.
• address intelligence: the ability to flag a specific address with intelligence data.
• address validation: the ability to validate addresses at the point of entry.
• common place names: the ability to store address information relating to specific or common place names.
The prototype was duly completed incorporating not only these, but many innovative ideas, thereby establishing a base platform from which the system was to be extended by BHA Computer.
The system commenced operation on the 10 September 1990 and future plans include two major sub-systems: tows, and messages through the ICL mainframe computer network.
Reviewal of the new system
The System is continuing to be reviewed. Two of the higher priority issues include: resolving cases of lumpy performance; and reviewing the role of the communications coordinator. Documented change requests are noted, awaiting attention, and further development of the system will cater for:
• mobile terminal facilities for beat and vehicle patrols to reduce radio airtime estimated to be in the vicinity of 30 per cent, provide direct access to existing databases and enhance police officer safety;
• provision of mapping facilities for major and minor incidents;
• call line identification, initially for emergency calls only;
• an executive information system, in addition to the current reports which are now available as a feature of the current system; and
• expansion of the system to other police regions throughout Queensland. (The South East region with a target site of the Gold Coast is an appropriate site for initial expansion of the system.)
Computer System Architecture
The computer hardware of the Command and Control CAD system comprises dual Hewlett Packard minicomputers along with two Hewlett Packard 360 workstations as ’boot nodes’ for starting the application which also act as logging devices. There are six gigabytes of disk storage and tape and printer devices. Figure 1 shows an outline of the full production configuration.
Figure 1
Queensland Police Service Command and Control System Configuration Diagram
To provide resilience, two separate-but-linked local area networks (LANs) have been installed and fifteen diskless workstations are connected to each LAN for the system operators. Ten workstations are installed in the Major Incident Room and twenty workstations in the Police Communications Centre. A separate linked Development System is now available.
The UNIX operating system HP-UX7, and Arpa/Berkley and NFS network services are used over the ethernet LAN. The application is written in SQL and the ’C’
screens are nineteen inch large-size, bit-mapped, multi-colour screens. The hardware reliability has been excellent.
Since commencing live operation on the 10 September 1990, there have been twenty-seven scheduled breaks of an average of one-and-a-half hours duration each. These scheduled breaks include new releases of application software and systems maintenance.
Unscheduled downtime covers operator errors, logs filling up, and problems with the application code and database. The longest outage was for fourteen hours on 27 October 1990. Since December 1990 through to September 1991, the CAD system has averaged less than two hours unscheduled downtime per month (that is, four minutes in every 24–hour period).
