Visibility-based GIS Workflows for Security Applications
Updated: 5 days ago
Case 1 - Security Application for VIPs: Line-of-Sight Analysis
Imagine a situation where a VVIP is coming to host a political rally at a park in your city and you have to design the security arrangements for the dignitary - where to position law enforcement agencies, patrol vehicles, aerial surveillance, snipers, drones etc. How would you go about doing it? Geotechnology is very useful to plan for such security workflows.
The concept is very simple: if one knows the position of the target and the geography of the surroundings: one can model a robust security plan using that information.
Do see this video demonstration -
(The video is best viewed in Youtube's HD setting either on PC or on Landscape mode in Mobile Phone. You can reduce / increase the play speed as per your viewing preferences)
Isn't this useful?
Publicly available information shows that Police and Military personnel already use these tools - Line of Sight & Viewshed Analysis extensively, to plan for military missions, provide security cover, conduct clearing operations and other security & surveillance workflows.
Case 2: Security Application for Military use: Viewshed Analysis
Let's see another workflow related to Military operation planning:
Image 1: Visualize that terrorists carrying snipers are located on the roof of a particular building (marked in purple) within an urban area and that and you have to stealthily evacuate the civilians in the adjacent buildings (all numbered) before proceeding to engage with the terrorists.
Image 2: The terrorists are expected to rove around i.e. not remain stationary. Hence, we'd need to conduct viewshed analysis considering the the roof of the building as the geographic extent i.e. considering all four corners (blue dots).
Image 3: Once we have a hi-res elevation model of the surroundings (a Digital Surface Model i.e. DSM) - we can conduct compute the Line of Sight - areas in green in the image above are visible from the roof while those in red are not.
Image 4: Of course, the security forces and those evacuated will need to travel by road. In this image, we've conducted visibility analysis considering specifically, the roads in the vicinity of the target building. Red dots represent 10 metres of Road area. Here, Red signifies visible areas and Green signifies not visible / obstructed areas from the roof of the target building.
One can use this as a base model to do more advanced workflows for security - there are specific geo-modules available to strategize for such intelligence operations - for military, crime prevention and other security applications.
These applications of visibility analysis are not restricted to security purposes only. They can even be applied to Real Estate design workflows besides other unique applications as well. Can you think of a few?
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Regards,
Much Thanks to Esri for the training material.