Modern societies have experienced a spate of catastrophic events in recent years. Terrorist attacks (London, Madrid, Mumbai), factory explosions (Enschede, Toulouse), floods and storms (Louisiana) – these are but a few examples of crises and disasters that threaten the security, prosperity and well being of citizens. Urbanised areas are especially vulnerable to the onset of crises and disasters. The combination of dense population concentrations (35M in Tokyo, 10M in Paris [UN07]) and complex architectural environments makes it very hard to anticipate, prepare for and manage the impact of natural, industrial or man-made incidents. The recent crises have demonstrated the inherent difficulties that urban safety and crisis managers face when a large-scale disaster threatens an urban environment. In this ever-changing environment, it is hard to design proper emergency plans, to train security organisations and effectively handle crisis management procedures.

Therefore, it is essential for public authorities to better plan and train organisations and crisis managers and to provide relevant systems for complex crisis management across organisational and geographic boundaries. This is no easy task, as research has shown. New approaches and technologies should therefore be researched and developed to serve these critical needs. 

INDIGO aims to provide a revolutionary solution that will enable inter-organisational preparation and support response to transboundary crises and disasters, in any environment. INDIGO will allow for inter-organizational exercising, information sharing and analysis – mining both horizontal and vertical relations. With regard to the latter, the relation between central command centres and field units is traditionally underdeveloped, both before and during crises. First responders are insufficiently involved in large-scale strategic exercises because these are very complex and expensive to organise and manage.

The proposed system will prove an essential and integrated tool for training personnel, planning operations, and facilitating crisis management and co-operation across organisations and nations. It will enable users to:
display and manipulate an operational representation of the situation that is as complete and as easy to understand as possible, for indoor and outdoor situations;
simulate different evolving scenarios for planning, training, and anticipating future states and impending developments during operations, and analyse events after the crisis;
involve first responders and emergency field units in simulated exercises;
enhance the work across organisational boundaries and decision levels.

 

The INDIGO project, is supported by the European Commission through the Security Research programme under FP7.