GIS Eye on Logistics
MGT 2008 Volume: 6 Issue: 4 (July/August)
IRRIS System Tracks, Displays and Shares Information to
Ensure Military Cargo Lands in the Right Hands at the Right Time.
by Brendan Wesdock
A GIS-based transportation security and logistics application called IRRIS is helping the U.S. military manage, document, and synchronize the movement of its surface cargo transported throughout the world.
IRRIS uses GIS and IT to ensure that soldiers in the field get what they need when they need it. Whether it’s making sure soldiers have their equipment, food or ammunition, IRRIS is a key component to the safe delivery and transport of materials and equipment.
In partnership with the Surface Deployment and Distribution Command Transportation Engineering Agency (SDDCTEA), GeoDecisions developed this application to help track, display and share information to ensure all military cargo lands in the right hands at the right time.
The application works by tying together infrastructure information about roads, bridges and waterways, as well as other information that might interfere with the movement of goods. The system displays this data in a map format to give users the tools to effectively organize and track military cargo. Through the application, transportation engineers, logisticians and specialists throughout the Department of Defense can zero in on the location and content of any military shipment or cargo being transported by road, rail or ocean carrier throughout the world.
IRRIS integrates this information into one interface called a common operating picture (COP), so that many different agencies and personnel can view and share information at the same time. The COP can help to improve response times, facilitate communication between personnel within the same or different agencies, and can even aid in minimizing fatalities that take place during emergency situations by making information readily accessible. IRRIS technology is built on the .Net framework using the GIS suite of solutions from ESRI.
In the development of IRRIS, SDDCTEA understood the need to make it possible to monitor the supplies en route in real time. To that end, the application incorporates in-transit visibility and total asset visibility to allow military personnel to access the current status, including location and content, of a military shipment anywhere in the world. Soldiers who are waiting for a supply of ammunition or food to reach their base can know when that shipment is scheduled to be delivered.
With IRRIS, military personnel are able to see current information on roadblocks, traffic conditions and adverse weather so that they can detour cargo shipments and choose the least disruptive course. IRRIS also allows military personnel to be alerted within seconds if a shipment deviates from its charted course.
CRISIS SUPPORT
IRRIS is versatile and can support a variety of planned and unplanned events and crisis situations. For example, the system was able to locate ammunition lost in transit for soldiers in the field during Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. Prior to the liberation of Iraq, a critical military unit was unable to locate much-needed ammunition and even considered spending millions of dollars to airlift the supplies to ensure they reached the front lines. With IRRIS, the munition stores were promptly located and quickly redirected to the soldiers. In another instance, it identified missing containers carrying food for soldiers in combat, once again avoiding costly reorders.
“In these situations, the intelligence available through IRRIS helped to ensure the safety of our soldiers, avoid the unnecessary expenditure of millions of taxpayer dollars and critically support the global war on terror,” said Paul Allred, IRRIS program manager with SDDCTEA. “Before IRRIS, DoD’s shipments and supply capabilities were largely segregated, making it difficult—if not impossible—to track the status of supplies. IRRIS not only displays when a shipment will arrive, but it can identify the contents of each cargo container.”
In the past, soldiers often had to physically unpack containers to determine whether a new shipment contained ammunition, food, clothing, books or office furniture. Now, cargo arrival, departure and content information are all available.
Using IRRIS, military personnel can:
- Monitor and track the location of freight traffic on a map in near-realtime
- Cross-reference location information with cargo booking systems
- Display weather and traffic conditions in near-real-time
- Generate reports for specified cargo shipments
- Query spatial data and cargo details, such as contents and weight.
Warfighters can also use IRRIS for vehicle routing. With it, soldiers can generate turn-by-turn driving directions that will provide them with total drive time, mileage and maps to reach their destination. Because IRRIS takes near-real-time weather reports, traffic speed, traffic incidents and roadway construction information into account when generating directions, military personnel will always receive the optimal driving route. IRRIS can also calculate routes to and from known points of interest, such as military installations and airports.
In addition, IRRIS can be an incident management tool. In the event that an incident would occur, soldiers would be able to use the COP to monitor the progress of response to that event. Personnel involved in the incident are able to update the status, update breaking news, and upload relevant documents. They can also annotate and share maps that could be useful during management of the incident.
Different levels of the government, including the military and other agencies, have already found numerous ways to utilize the application to enhance decisionmaking and support their missions. Since the development of IRRIS nearly a decade ago, more than 500 people in federal and state agencies have used the technology for emergency management, logistics, tracking and crisis-management tasks.
IRRIS will continue to grow as new data becomes available and as new functionality is requested, making the application a continuously relevant tool for soldiers on the home front and abroad. ♦