The Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) and the National Alliance for Public Safety GIS (NAPSG) Foundation recently demonstrated the new Local Infrastructure Network Knowledge (LINK) Toolkit for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
LINK is designed to help emergency managers better understand how local infrastructure is interconnected so communities can strengthen resilience, improve preparedness, and recover faster, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Every community relies on essential systems and services including clean water, sewage treatment, electricity, transportation, and communications networks. These are known as Local Significant Infrastructure (LSI), and any loss or damage to them can significantly affect the community and the people who live there.
A clear and complete understanding of LSI enhances disaster preparedness and planning, helps emergency personnel mitigate threats during catastrophic events, and supports faster recovery afterward. Strong situational awareness is also critical to the delivery of disaster assistance from state and federal agencies.
In response to requests from FEMA, S&T engaged NAPSG to develop a software toolkit that better addresses the need to identify and understand LSI. The recent demonstration gave DHS Component stakeholders an opportunity to review LINK's progress toward this goal.
"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. "In the wildfire scenario above, LINK could help identify water shutoff locations to protect the system, and it could quickly identify that a hospital and regional memory care center are without power while other specific facilities are not. It's these real-time infrastructure details that make all the difference."
LINK is not just a master LSI list or database. It is a toolkit that allows local governments and emergency managers to locate structures geographically, attach relevant contact information, and identify critical interdependencies among infrastructure assets. It can answer questions about what is vital, how the loss of one asset could affect other LSI, and how those effects could cascade across systems. It can also simulate and model events before they occur.
"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," said Langhelm.
Key features include no special technical expertise required, an open-source foundation, custom artificial intelligence support, automated relationship modeling, community-defined significance, a bring-your-own-data design, and a taxonomy- and ontology-agnostic structure.
An updated version incorporating stakeholder feedback is underway. 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, with an anticipated release and transition date of spring 2028.