SERSCIS

For the initial prototype in SERSCIS, the Decision Support Tools (DST) have been enhanced with the development of a monitoring and message passing framework that integrates with the InfoSec editor. The editor has also been enhanced with supplemental user interface components that build on the existing user interface to provide non-intrusive notification of monitoring messages to the user.

As shown in the diagram to the left, monitoring messages can be supplied from the SERSCIS system either as part of the event-decision-action loop of SERSCIS via the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) when the system cannot make a decision based on policy, or as direct notifications of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from the components themselves.

The initial monitoring framework has been developed independently of the other SERSCIS components and will be integrated with them in the final prototype through a “monitoring translator” that will be specifically designed to convert the SERSCIS messages in to the more general form used by the monitoring framework. This separation of monitoring consumer from monitoring provider allows for both the creation of mock providers in the initial prototype to indicate how the system will work as well as a way in which additional monitoring values from other sources can be readily incorporated.

The screenshot to the left shows an example of the colour filters highlighting entities in red that have received monitoring messages in a simple Airport Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) system in the InfoSec tooling. The use of colouring to highlight these entities allows the user to be visually notified of monitoring events and incidents, thereby improving their situational awareness without reaching an information overload caused by a storm of dialog notifications. Different severities of monitoring event can be represented by different colours, emphasising the most serious events. The most extreme and important monitoring events could provide dialog notifications to be purposefully intrusive in the user’s operations, although this would have to be tempered against the aforementioned “dialog storm”.