Overview#
When a major road traffic collision triggers simultaneous dispatch across police, fire, and ambulance services, each agency's Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) system records the incident independently, in its own proprietary format. The CAD Integration Ingest module continuously streams, normalises, and enriches incident data from multiple disparate CAD systems, merging them into a single unified incident record that all responding agencies can act on in real time.
By translating proprietary CAD protocols and data formats into a common operational schema, the module ensures that a police dispatcher working on one CAD platform and a fire dispatcher working on another see the same incident on a single common operating picture. This removes duplication, reduces radio traffic, and enables coordinated multi-agency response without requiring agencies to replace their existing dispatch infrastructure.
Key Features#
- Real-Time Incident Streaming: New incidents, unit dispatch events, and status changes are ingested continuously from connected CAD systems with sub-second latency, keeping the common operating picture current.
- Narrative Entity Extraction: Natural language processing extracts structured entities including persons, vehicles, weapon descriptions, and hazardous material codes from unstructured CAD narrative fields, making free-text operationally searchable.
- Multi-CAD Federation: Incidents from multiple regional CAD vendors are aggregated into a unified schema, enabling a single interoperable view across police, fire, ambulance, and coastguard agencies regardless of their underlying dispatch platform.
- Bi-Directional Status Synchronisation: Status updates entered by mobile responders or command operators are written back to the originating CAD system, maintaining it as the authoritative system of record throughout the incident lifecycle.
- Automatic Geocoding: Vague or informal location descriptions from CAD narratives are resolved to precise geospatial coordinates, enabling accurate map plotting, routing, and proximity-based resource allocation.
- Tenant-Isolated Multi-Agency Views: Each agency's data is held in strict organisational isolation. Cross-agency visibility is granted only through explicit mutual-aid authorisation, preventing accidental disclosure between jurisdictions.
- Duplicate Incident Correlation: Incidents independently raised by multiple agencies for the same event are automatically correlated and deduplicated, presenting operators with a single consolidated record rather than fragmented parallel entries.
- Configurable Transformation Rules: Field-mapping and transformation logic is configurable per CAD vendor, allowing new CAD integrations to be onboarded without changes to the core ingestion pipeline.
Use Cases#
- Regional interoperability centres aggregate dispatch data from police, fire, and emergency medical services using different CAD vendors, creating a common operating picture for large-scale major incident or disaster coordination.
- Mobile responders receive enriched dispatch information including extracted risk factors, vehicle descriptions, and hazard flags directly on their mobile data terminals, independent of the underlying CAD system's native mobile client.
- Mutual-aid coordinators activating cross-border or cross-county resources gain a federated view of all active incidents across participating agencies, enabling more accurate resource prioritisation without phone or radio arbitration.
- Post-incident analysts replay the full timeline of unit dispatch, status changes, and narrative updates drawn from multiple CAD sources to produce accurate after-action reports and support coroner or public inquiry submissions.
- Command supervisors monitoring a prolonged public-order event receive consolidated unit-tracking and tasking information from both police and medical CAD systems on one screen, reducing the cognitive load of switching between separate control room displays.
Integration#
The CAD Integration Ingest module feeds normalised, geocoded incident records to the Unified Command Map, the Mobile Responder application, and the AI Triage module. It operates as the authoritative incident source for downstream workflows, so that resource allocation, risk scoring, and situational-display modules all draw from a single consistent record rather than each maintaining independent copies of CAD data. Integration with Records Management Systems (RMS) allows closed incidents to be forwarded automatically for case creation, reducing manual re-keying by dispatchers.
Open Standards#
- NIEM Emergency Management Domain (v5): Incident and unit records are mapped to National Information Exchange Model Emergency Management schemas, ensuring interoperability with federal and state agency data exchanges.
- EDXL-RM (Emergency Data Exchange Language Resource Messaging): Unit dispatch actions and status transitions are represented using EDXL-RM message structures, supporting exchange with regional emergency operations centres that consume EDXL feeds.
- EDXL-HAVE (Hospital Availability Exchange): Where CAD incidents involve casualty routing, EDXL-HAVE structures are used to represent receiving facility capacity alongside the incident record.
- OGC GeoJSON (RFC 7946): All geospatial incident and unit locations are stored and exchanged as GeoJSON, enabling direct consumption by standards-compliant mapping and GIS platforms.
- OASIS CAP (Common Alerting Protocol, ITU-T X.1303): Incoming public alert feeds that trigger CAD incidents can be correlated with corresponding CAP messages to enrich situational context.
- IETF RFC 8259 (JSON): All normalised incident records are serialised as JSON, ensuring broad compatibility with third-party command systems and data warehouses.
- STANAG 2525 (APP-6): Military symbol codes present in joint civil-military incidents are interpreted using STANAG 2525 / APP-6 symbology, supporting operations where defence and emergency services share a common operating picture under PESCO or European Defence Fund (EDF) aligned frameworks.
Availability#
- Enterprise Plan: Included
- Professional Plan: Available with a single CAD connector; multi-CAD federation and bi-directional synchronisation require upgrade to Enterprise.
Last Reviewed: 2026-05-26