Prevention and response to grassland fires in Wales

The Welsh Government has been supported by Y Lab's Digital Innovation Accelerator to develop a tool to help prevent deliberate fires on areas of open grassland in Wales, an area of concern to policy makers in the government, police, the fire and rescue services and more.

The project has now made connections with colleagues in the Police, working in areas of mutual interest such as predictive policing and project fusion (intelligence transmitted to/from officers via mobile devices). Examining digital initiatives and projects with cross cutting areas of interest and solution discovery is necessary to reduce costs, maximize the benefits, and prevent potential duplication of work. There is also a need to consider organisational changes such as the combining of two Fire & Rescue Service Centres within one new Joint Public Service Centre at South Wales Police headquarters.

The project has now gained enough understanding regarding the business data flows, the security issues, and the potential use cases, such that solutions for the architecture can be considered and the scope of the procurement is becoming clearer. The design options have been drawn together into a document which provides a basis upon which potential solutions can be tested.

Currently, the deliberate grassfire viewer project is now proposing two interfaces:

1. Prevention - a public view bringing data available from data.police.uk, with fire data that may be obfuscated for public consumption. This data would be at least one month old and would be low fidelity resolution to mitigate data protection risk.

2. Response - a private view bringing daily extracts from operational command and control systems together, although not necessarily containing personal data, this data would be of a higher fidelity and would need to be restricted to the blue light audience - as per current policies.

Preliminary market investigation is promising and shows that there are a number of tools suitable for this dual viewing requirement. Both interfaces would allow the data to be combined with other open data of interest from NRW, Met Office and Welsh Government. The response interface may also serve as a pilot which stimulates requirements for updated command and control operational systems.

Work is continuing on refining the requirements further such that the procurement work may begin.

 

Author

Mason Davis

Mason Davis is a Project Manager and Digital Technology Analyst working with the Welsh Government. He works in the field of knowledge and platform development using a range of discipli…