A far-back view of a hillside of homes. Mountains are in the background.

DHS & NATO Wrap Up Disaster Management Project with Final Exercise in North Macedonia

As part of the final testing and evaluation phase, NATO used NICS as the main communications technology during its annual Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Capability Exercise in Ohrid.
October 6, 2021
Homeland Security Today

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T), in partnership with NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme, concluded a four-year project with a final disaster management exercise in North Macedonia. The Advanced Regional Civil Emergency Coordination Project (ARCECP) kicked off in November 2016 to further develop and deploy a communication platform for first responders called the Next Generation Incident Command System (NICS). NICS will be available to the international first responder community as an open source code through Beacon NGO.

Funded by S&T and developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory (MIT LL), NICS has been used in the Western Balkans over the last four years in real life incidents, allowing first responders to share information, including images and GPS locations, between their mobile devices.

“I am in awe of the accomplishments achieved by our technical team in close collaboration with the outstanding crisis management professionals across all nations,” said Stephanie Foster, MIT LL lead project manager and software engineer. “We are very proud of the NICS NATO system and the contributions that it has and will continue to make to the wider disaster response community.”