WASY has over the last ten years, in close cooperation with the Berlin Fire Brigades, developed the GeoFES package, which supports the decision making in the emergency assistance, in connection with specific disasters, or prevention of possible disasters at major national events like the FIFA World Cup in soccer in 2006.

For the city of Berlin, Germany’s capital and largest city, fast access to complex information of all useful data by the chief officers is essential. Successful emergency response requires stable, efficient and user-friendly software, and GeoFES is continuously improved through project experience.

The GeoFES application for preventive fire protection is installed at the Berlin Fire Brigades on mobile computers in their command cars, in monitoring cars, and on stationary desktops.

A crucial point in an emergency situation is the coordination of all forces/authorities involved in disaster management. The Berlin Fire Brigades works closely together with other governmental authorities such as the Emission Control Agency from Senate Office or the State Office of Criminal Investigation.

One of the important functionality of GeoFES, as a decision support system, is the cartographic visualisation of emergency area. The GeoFES application in Berlin combines a large amount of data delivered by different agencies. Since a successful emergency requires up-to-date data, WASY assists the Berlin Fire Brigade with updating the application regularly.

Figure 1: map illustrates used raster data (topographic maps, ortophotos) in GeoFES Berlin

The Berlin application includes more than 1200 alarm plans with information about escape routes, location of hazardous material that are linked to objects in the map. Information boxes help the user to quickly identify all important data about health, education and city traffics (figure 2).

Figure 2: Map of emergency area with an alarm plan and school information box

After the analysis chief officer receives the important information about demographics, buildings with high exposition (facilities, hotels, hospitals. schools e.g.) as an HTML –protocol (figure 3).

Figure 3: Example of an HTML-Protocol

GeoFES is scalable and customizable and the Berlin State Office of Criminal Investigation has added additional information into the GeoFES application, such as likely crime areas (water closets, parks) and policy departments.