Urban Emergency Service
Sectors :
Description
The city infrastructure must be able to respond to various challenges including catastrophic events, natural disasters, terrors attacks and further cases of emergencies. For that purpose, an integrated emergency handling system is required that can close the gap between emergency centres and the citizens. On the one hand, this system should be able to acquire information from and around citizens based, for instance, on social networks or various sensors distributed in the vicinity in question. On the other hand, the system can provide means for pushing notifications and relevant information to citizens that are potentially in danger.
Benefits
The main goal of the Urban Emergency Service is to react fast and reliable on emergencies. Thereby, it intends to increase sercurity within the city of operation. Besides that, the solution achieves the benefits listed below. Whereas some benefits are likely to be fulfiled with a basic implementation of the solution, the fulfilment of the potential benefits depends on the functions implemented in a specific project.
Main Benefits
Improving social integration
Improving life quality
Increasing safety
Functions
Functions help you to understand what the products can do for you and which ones will help you achieve your goals.
Each solution has at least one mandatory function, which is needed to achieve the basic purpose of the solution, and several additional functions, which are features that can be added to provide additional benefits.
Mandatory Functions
Products that inform people about local emergencies, such as an App
Products that are able to monitor local circumstances during emergencies and detect them, such as cameras
Potential Functions
Products that ease the emergency management
Products using the emergency system to increase the safety of events
Products that enable people (such as volunteers) to respond to the current state of the emergency
Products that ease the cooperation between various departments and organisations in case of an emergency
Products offering these functions

Safety and security solutions
A wide range of networked solutions for efficiently monitoring public areas in cities and effectively managing security, safety, and communications.
Business Model
Market Overview
The solution allows city stakeholders (e.g. police, utility companies, planners etc.) and citizens fast and efficient exchange of information in emergencies and the monitoring of catastrophic events and the implementation of ad-hoc response strategies. (Fraunhofer Focus, 2017) The implementation of an Emergency System improves both its living conditions and increase its tax base for a city. Emergency and security services are not always well funded, but they are critical and very likely to be engaged in the early rollouts of smart systems. (Forst and Sullivan, 2015)
Currently, implemented Emergency Systems and their scope are displayed on the following map:
(Forst and Sullivan, 2017)
See the full research here, page 15 -20.
Marketable Outcomes
Besides the potential increase of the tax income, Urban Emergency Systems also attract businesses and investments as they offer a safe environment. (First and Sullivan, 2015)
Forst and Sullivan identified factors which are most likely to support the implementation of Urban Emergency Systems, these are:
- need to curtail the crime rate
- smart city initiatives
- IoT and smart analytics
- modernisation of legacy cameras
- efficient storage management
(Forst and Sullivan, 2017)
Possible Emergencies the System may include are shown in the following figure:
(Abuja, 2017)
Driving Factors
Supporting Infrastructure
The urban ICT emergency system requires reliable and efficient backbone and mobile communication network, which enable the interaction between citizens and emergency handling team in both directions.
Government Initiatives
The ICT emergency system should be realized in the scope of advanced public safety, in which case a cooperation with the city municipality and belonging stakeholders is required.
Legal Requirements
Regulations
- ISO/TC 223 Societal Security: develops standards for public and private organizations
- ISO 22320, 2011 Societal security: Emergency management, Requirements for incident response
- ISO 22324 Societal security: Emergency management, Colour-coded alert
- ISO/TC 204 Intelligent transport systems: focuses on standardization of information, communication and control systems in the field of urban and rural surface transportation, including intermodal and multimodal aspects thereof, traveller information, traffic management, public transport, commercial transport, emergency services and commercial services in the intelligent transport systems(ITS) field
- ISO 37120 and ISO /TC 268 Fire and Emergency Response: Sustainable development of communities for a holistic and integrated approach to sustainable development and resilience in smart-cities (ISO/IEC JTC1, 2015̀)