The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate and the National Alliance for Public Safety GIS Foundation recently showcased a new software toolkit designed to help emergency managers map local infrastructure and predict how disasters could ripple across connected systems.
The Local Infrastructure Network Knowledge, or LINK, Toolkit was demonstrated for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, according to a feature article published by the department on Wednesday.
LINK focuses on what officials call Local Significant Infrastructure, which includes clean water systems, sewage treatment, electricity, transportation, and communications networks. Damage to any of these systems can disrupt daily life and complicate recovery efforts, the directorate said.
The Science and Technology Directorate, referred to as S&T, engaged the National Alliance for Public Safety GIS, known as NAPSG, to build the toolkit in response to requests from FEMA. The recent demonstration allowed Department of Homeland Security component stakeholders to review the tool’s progress.
“As the research and development arm of DHS, we are assisting FEMA in supporting community resilience with local-level infrastructure, empowering emergency managers with improved decision-support tools,” said S&T Program Manager Ron Langhelm.
Langhelm described a wildfire scenario in which LINK could help identify water shutoff points to protect the drinking water system and pinpoint which facilities, such as a hospital or a regional memory care center, have lost power. “It’s these real-time infrastructure details that make all the difference,” he said.
According to the directorate, LINK is not simply a list or database. The toolkit allows local governments and emergency managers to locate structures geographically, attach contact information, and identify interdependencies among infrastructure assets. It can also simulate events before they occur to support planning and system hardening, and it lets local operators verify the connections predicted by the analysis.
The directorate offered a second example involving an electricity substation located in a flood-prone area. If flooding disabled the substation and it powered a wastewater treatment facility, that plant could shut down and cause overflows, creating a public health hazard. Officials said identifying such cascading failures is not possible with a simple inventory list.
Key features of LINK include an open-source foundation, a custom artificial intelligence capability that assesses networks for potential failure points, automated relationship modeling, and a bring-your-own-data design in which infrastructure data is not stored and local planners keep control of their information. The toolkit is also designed to be used without special technical expertise and to allow communities to define what they consider significant.
“By empowering communities with tools to identify their relevant infrastructure and any connections and interdependencies, LINK will help fill information gaps between owner-operators and federal data products, saving emergency managers valuable time in meeting incident planning and response requirements,” Langhelm said.
An updated version of the toolkit incorporating stakeholder feedback is in development. The team is collaborating with MIT Lincoln Laboratory on a testing and evaluation workshop in late October and is targeting early 2027 for another demonstration. The anticipated release and transition date is spring 2028.
Provided by Dallas Express
