Project Presentation

1
Project Presentation

• 18th March 2008

2
Content

• Research Initiative
• Project Sheet
• Application Domain
• Operational Issues
• Mission
• Points of Contact

3
Research Initiative

• Framework Programme 7 Security Research Call 1
• Activity Restoring security and safety in case
  of crisis
• The first challenge of this activity is to
  ensure that governments, first responders and
  societies are better prepared prior to
  unpredictable catastrophic incidents using new,
  innovative and affordable solutions.
• The second challenge is to improve the tools,
  infrastructures, procedures and organisational
  frameworks to respond and recover more
  efficiently and effectively both during, and
  after, an incident.
• Topic Intelligent decision support
• In order to enhance the efficiency of command
  and control by intelligent decision support
  systems, the task is to develop appropriate novel
  approaches to computer assisted decision making.
  Applications should be robust and facilitate the
  cooperation of operational units across
  organisational boundaries.

4
Project Sheet

• Focus
• Focus on decision support both prior and after
  incident
• Focus on Health Service addressing also
  cooperation with other organization
• Objective
• Improve Health Service crisis managers
  decision-making capabilities through an
  integrated suite of modelling and analysis tools
  providing insights into the collective behaviour
  of the whole organisation in response to crisis
  scenarios
• Start Date
• 1st March 2008
• End Date
• 31st August 2010
• Involved Nations
• Italy, Poland, Ireland, Germany, Israel, Denmark

5
Application Domain

• The response to the crisis is the result of the
  activities of
• different services (e.g. police, medical care,
  rescue forces, fire fighting, etc)
• interacting vertically (i.e. with components of
  the same organization) and horizontally (i.e.
  with components of other organizations)
• in a complex environment

6
Operational Issues

• Intra service
• The overall response to the crisis depends not
  only on the quantity of the individual entities
  but also largely on how those entities cooperate
  in harmony with one another through the entire
  scenario.
• Inter service
• Although individual service organization may be
  quite effective, the system as a whole may
  experience a significant failure to respond due
  to a faulty or deficient inter-service
  interaction
• Procedures
• Several factors could lead decision makers to
  fail in the application of the defined
  procedures
• decision makers are forced to make important
  decisions under pressure and in a time critical
  context
• international assistance may be necessary and it
  is likely that decision makers of different
  countries have implemented very different
  procedures from one another
• good procedures may not function if not
  adequately trained and exercised at national and
  international level

7
Operational Issues

• Unpredictable factors
• The situation evolution will be determined by
  both predictable factors (e.g. the crisis
  responders behaviour according to procedures)
  and unpredictable ones (e.g. human/crowd
  behaviour).
• As a consequence, the decision making process is
  hard and complex

8
Mission

• The project aims at improving crisis managers
  decision-making capabilities in the following
  phases
• preparation assisting in the identification of
  the best way to employ available assets, the
  limits of the achievable response and the
  effectiveness of different inter/intra-services
  cooperation procedures
• response providing a forecast of scenario
  evolution, proposing doctrine-based solutions and
  evaluating the effects of alternative decisions

9
Mission

• Decision-making support will be provided through
  an integrated suite of modelling and analysis
  tools.
• Key research aspects are
• bottom-up modelling approach
• build independent model components and then
  combine them
• unpredictable factors modelling
• human behaviour, mass behaviour
• procedure support
• provide the user with the correct procedures to
  solve the problem
• computation of the distribution of the
  effectiveness of a certain decision rather than
  the effectiveness of that solution
  deterministically dependant on the preconceived
  scenario
• The combined effects of the above points will
  allow to document both the unexpected bad and
  good things in the organization(s) thus leading
  to better responses, fewer unintended
  consequences and greater consensus on important
  decisions.

10
Points of Contact