Resilient Location Intelligence
The RBOC blog series so far has explored the basis of the scenario that is underpinning the project by exploring how and why threat actors may try to harm us, and that has helped us think more imaginatively about the methods that they might use, as well as the vulnerabilities that they might try to expose and exploit over the coming years and decades. It has also helped us consider the types and magnitudes of impacts that occur if such an eventuality did happen. What we haven’t thought about yet is how we can harness science (in its broadest sense) and technology to help us plan, respond, and recover from such catastrophic events, as well as understand how the attack could, indeed, render our preparations and response tools virtually redundant
When we think about the impacts in the scenario in their entirety, they cover many different systems, organisations, and challenges. Planning the response to such complexity and diversity requires significant amounts of data and information to be collected, maintained, and managed routinely by emergency planners and first responders. In the immediate aftermath they will need to be able to collect, create, manage and share new data in near real-time with many different partners so that a common operating picture emerges and exists. But this does not come without challenges.
Ordnance Survey, in their Building resilience to respond to extreme weather events insights blog, highlights that one of the greatest ‘challenges in responding to emergencies is access to accurate location data about people and places’ and the ability for organisations to share it. Some of the main issues include:
Policy: where the data is governed by specific policies that can restrict its shareability; or where data might sit at certain government classification levels
Information Security: where systems and their security policies and protocols restrict the ability to share and/or ingest data and information; or where there is limited confidence in the security of the systems where the data is being shared and hosted
Technology Issues: where the software and hardware may not exist to be able to view, manipulate, and/or share the data and information
Data Compatibility: where issues such as interoperability impact on the effective sharing of data and information between organisations and government departments
In the UK today, the Cabinet Office’s ResilienceDirect map service provides a mechanism that helps overcome a lot of the challenges identified above by providing accessible, sharable and authoritative geospatial data at scale, and in real time, to blue light emergency responders, as well as public and private sector organisations on much of the key geospatial data on people and places. And there are many examples at the international level where data standardisation and geospatial data platforms have been developed to reduce the friction and data-pain of planning for and responding to emergencies.
But what will Resilient Location Intelligence look like in 2050?
As our colleague, Andrew, highlighted in one of our earlier blogs ‘prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future’ (quoting Niels Bohr). In keeping with the thinking presented in Andrew’s blog which detailed the need to ‘think like an attacker‘ in order to understand how a threat actor might attack us, the only way that we can imagine what location intelligence might be needed in the future, particularly so far ahead in 2050, is to ‘think like a planner’ and ‘think like a responder’ to such incidents.
But even if we use existing approaches, such as the M/ETHANE model and we consider the principles in the context of the future, thinking like a planner and responder is not without challenge – if not virtually impossible. There are so many unknowns that impact on the ability to create a common operating picture using location data and information.
In our catastrophic scenario, the attack results in the telecommunications infrastructure and location services going down among many other things. So how would responders declare a major incident and how would they collect and communicate the necessary information required to command, control and coordinate an effective and efficient response? And how would they be able to map and share that data with partners. There are also key questions around how responders would be able to understand and communicate the exact location and type of associated incidents occurring throughout Greater Manchester. This is before you get into even more complex issues such as communicating hazards and casualties, as well as where is accessible and where is not.
Currently, we have access to excellent location-based resources such as What3Words and the geospatial data provided through ResilienceDirect and the UK Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA) that helps us with these issues. None of us know, however, what will be available in the future, how it might be collected, and how it might be consumed by all relevant partners.
What we do know is that there has been significant investment in emerging technologies with considerable focus in areas such as quantum inertial navigation systems that will be invulnerable to Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) outages – in turn helping to make our critical infrastructure more resilient. If developed as expected, these will help overcome the location issues when responding to catastrophic incidents. We also know that there have been extensive developments in semi-autonomous platforms and sensors across all domains (land, air, maritime, cyber and space) in both military and civilian categories including UAVs, connected and (semi)autonomous vehicles (including teleoperations), and more broadly the Internet of Things (IoT)/Smart Cities. But some of these depend on there being a data connection for them to work. So, we need to start thinking about how we overcome these barriers in both knowledge and technological capability, as well as how we mitigate any associated risks.
Future Resilient Location Intelligence in the RBOC Network+
Over the term of the project, we want to engage researchers, government and industry in exploring what future location intelligence might look like over the coming decades and develop thinking around a number of core questions:
How might geospatial data and infrastructure evolve over the coming decades?
How can we utilise multi-domain systems/sensors/platforms in near real-time for developing geospatial common operating pictures for responders and decision makers?
What will future geospatial infrastructure need to include to be resilient in the context of a catastrophic attack on digital infrastructure?; and how will responders be able to overcome challenges, including connectivity, to provide real-time data and information