Mr. Kern, acting as a consultant, was the lead architect involved in the creation of the Intergraph iAlarmPlus product. This software (with companion product iSensor) converted the 20+ year old Intergraph CAD software product line into a means to address force protection, SensorNet, counterterrorism, and CBRNE applications. This software is used as the core display and dispatch technology in the Ft. Bragg SensorNet prototype. It is also a key component of the Department of Homeland Security SBI (Strategic Border Initiative). It is currently applied at a wide range of secure facillities within DoD and other agencies of government. It forms the basis of various cutting edge municipal counterterorism systems, including some in New York.
With the other team members (David Scott Jones of Lockheed and Dae Lee, Mikey Samlok, Alex Blanko of Intergraph) a graphic overlay mechanism was applied to allow real-time moving alarms to be displayed above the entire Intergraph CAD display planes. A real-time heirarchical database was used to manage incomming data and status for multiple CAD stations in a dispatch center. A small "adapter" must be created for any new protocol to connect to the real-time database. Each type of alarm object has a context menu specialized to the type of functions available for that object. Alarms are color-coded for severity and type.
Original design allowed iAlarmPlus to be used to display all types of "foreign units". This allowed it to be potentialy applied to blue force tracking, integration with multiple CAD systems in a federated environment and other applications. Given this rance of capabillity iAlarmPlus (with iSensor for cameras) essentialy merged a C4ISR environment with CAD. This technology is capable of tracking hundreds of simultaneous moving targets in real-time, such as all the trains in a subway system or all the ships in a harbor. It is unclear if Intergaraph will "dumb down" these capabillities over time due to production and support constraints and reduced product vision- and, quite frankly, less architecture expertise.
Note: Work on iAlarmPlus should not be confused with constriction of single point integration solutions from UNISYS, Northrup, ENSCO and others- this is a core product from US #2 CAD vendor Intergraph and represents the core technology applied to dozens of integration projects. iAlarmPlus represents a new generation of security management integrating police dispatch operations with sensor integration directly, and should also not be confused with security only products from Honeywell and others.
"If you do anything long enough, you eventually get good at it." MK