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www.seadiscovery.com Marine Technology Reporter 43 ent to offshore oil and gas rigs. “We are not limiting our- selves to anything,” said Hanmer, “if you have anything you want to protect that’s in or under the water, this is an option.

PURVIS Systems contribution to the UPSIDE program is the UPSIDE First Responder System (UFRS). Based upon its robust Incident Management and Control

System (IMACS) platform, UFRS is the direct link into the available First Responder community, and is a distrib- uted interoperable management system used to track, share, and manage incident information and assets over a secure wide-area network. UFRS includes an automatic vehicle location (AVL) tracking feature, which provides real-time GPS location for all key First Responder assets.

This feature provides the incident manager with the abil- ity to quickly assess the adequacy of the response and to determine whether additional first responders should be requested and where their assistance is needed.

UFRS also includes the PURVIS Emergency

Notification System (ENS). PURVIS ENS is a Web-based system that enables organizations to respond quickly in an emergency by sending mass alerts to common communi- cations devices – mobile and landline telephones, PDAs, computers, pagers and more – through broadcast voice and text messaging.

Additionally, PURVIS provided Rite Solutions with engineering support for requirements definition, system design specifications, framework development, systems integration, and scenario development

In addition to hosting the UPSIDE demonstration,

PEMA coordinated the resources and inclusion of the

Providence Police and Fire Departments, as well as the RI

Department of Environmental Management/Law

Enforcement Division and the RI State Fusion Center.

What is UPSIDE?

UPSIDE is a Command and Control service oriented architec- ture system designed to provide three principle objectives: • an integrated, interoperable test bed environment that allow evaluation of prototype undersea security systems in an end to end security context, • a simulation environment that robust system performance evaluation as well as mission rehearsal and evaluation, • an undersea perimeter defense system that can be operated in a stand-alone mode or integrated into a comprehensive maritime defense system.

Mike Grzechowiak, Software Project

Manager and Technical Lead/Mgr. (Photo Cour tesy: RITE Solutions) (Photo Cour tesy: RITE Solutions) (Photo Cour tesy: RITE Solutions)

Dean Balcirak,

System Test Engineer

Rory Hanmer,

Lead Software Engineer (Photo Cour tesy: PUR

VIS)