Overview#
A search-and-rescue team is responding to a major flooding event. The incident commander needs to know, right now, whether there are enough life vests, inflatable boats, and portable pumps across the responding teams to handle a mass casualty water rescue. The Inventory domain provides that picture: serialised equipment tracked individually with assignment status, bulk consumables tracked by quantity with low-stock alerts, and an incident readiness assessment that matches available equipment against defined requirements for this type of event.
When a supply truck arrives at the staging area with additional equipment, the quartermaster opens a seized equipment manifest, and the AI intake capability reads the document and proposes the items for addition to the inventory. A human reviews and approves the proposal before the items are added to the live count.
Key Features#
- Dual tracking: serialised items for individual asset tracking and bulk stock levels for quantity-based consumables
- Item type catalogue with categories, tags, and configurable tracking modes
- Item assignment lifecycle: available, assigned, in use, maintenance, and retired
- Stock level management with UPSERT, par levels, reorder points, and low-stock detection
- Usage event audit trail linked to incidents, investigations, and cases
- AI-powered intake that analyses evidence documents to propose inventory items
- Human-in-the-loop review workflow for AI proposals: approve, reject, or cancel
- Apply modes for stock updates: additive for restocking and absolute for setting a count
- Incident readiness assessment via tag-based equipment matching against requirements
- Federated inventory visibility across dispatch agreement providers with access level controls
Use Cases#
- Managing serialised equipment such as body-worn cameras or specialist tools with full assignment lifecycle tracking
- Monitoring bulk stock levels of consumables with automatic low-stock detection and reorder alerts before critical shortages occur
- Using AI to automatically propose inventory items from equipment manifests, transfer documents, or evidence records
- Assessing incident readiness by matching available equipment tags and quantities against the requirements defined for a specific incident type
Industry Context#
Emergency services coordinate equipment inventories across multiple stations and response teams, particularly during mutual aid activations where resources from different organisations are pooled. Police forces track serialised assets such as body-worn cameras, firearms, and specialist surveillance equipment through strict assignment lifecycles. Military logistics units manage federated inventory visibility across coalition partners under dispatch agreements. Utility operators track vehicle-mounted equipment and crew tool kits to ensure work orders are assigned only to crews with the required parts and tools on board.
Integration#
The Inventory domain integrates with Dispatch Federation for cross-tenant visibility, cloud storage for evidence document access, AI services for document analysis, and Evidence Documents for intake source materials. All inventory records are stored in PostgreSQL with organisation-scoped access control.
Open Standards#
- GraphQL (June 2018 specification): All inventory queries and mutations are exposed through a typed GraphQL API, enabling clients to request precisely the fields they need for item types, stock levels, assignments, usage events, and intake jobs.
- JSON (RFC 8259): AI-generated intake proposals, per-item metadata, and approved payload documents are all represented as RFC 8259 JSON, allowing structured data to flow between the AI analysis pipeline, the human review workflow, and the inventory store.
- ISO 8601: Every timestamp in the domain, including assignment dates, usage event times, stock count times, and intake job review times, is stored and returned as an ISO 8601 UTC datetime.
- RFC 4122 (UUID): All entity identifiers, including item types, inventory items, stock levels, usage events, and intake jobs, are generated as version-4 UUIDs, ensuring globally unique keys across federated tenants.
- JSON Web Token (RFC 7519) / JSON Web Signature (RFC 7515) with RS256: Inventory API access is gated by RS256-signed JWTs verified against a JWKS endpoint, implementing the bearer token pattern defined in RFC 6750.
- GeoJSON (RFC 7946): Dispatch federation agreements, which govern which provider tenants a PSAP may query for federated inventory readiness, carry coverage area geometries encoded as GeoJSON, scoping cross-tenant equipment visibility to defined geographic boundaries.
- IANA Media Types (RFC 2046): Evidence documents submitted to the AI intake pipeline are identified by their MIME type, allowing the multimodal analysis model to interpret images, video, and other document formats correctly before proposing inventory items.
Last Reviewed: 2026-02-24 Last Updated: 2026-04-14