Technological Background

In the frame of the Preparatory Action for the Security Programme, the European Commission has funded the CRIMSON project, which has been acknowledged [BDCGS08, NBBD07, CCD07] as impressive progress beyond the current state-of-the-art.

This project implemented a radically new training system for operational preparedness by enabling the simulation of crisis management within synthetic urban environments. It offers today a unique tool for creating and handling simulated crisis situations, between multiple users with different educational or cultural background, while modifying and unfolding various training scenarios that would be difficult to recreate in real conditions.

The CRIMSON project received a two-month contract extension from the European Commission to assess the relevance of additional objectives that were out of the project scope and even unthinkable during the project: Could CRIMSON technologies be extended to homogeneously support all categories of environments, including indoor operations, real exercises combining simulated scenarios and personnel actually sent to the field, and decision support during real incidents?

After two months of heavy evaluation, end-users’ answer is clear and loud: Yes, definitely! It is the purpose of the INDIGO project to implement this approach based on both the CRIMSON technology and DIGINEXT's VirtualGeo product.

Scientific & Technological Objectives

The INDIGO consortium provides the world-class and complementary competencies required to tackle the following scientific and technological challenges:

1. Implementing techniques for storing and visualising massive complex geographic, architectural and environmental datasets in real-time, from global scale to building interiors [Figure 1]. These techniques will not only support geometric (e.g. terrain, building…) and textural (e.g. aerial of spatial pictures) but also non Euclidian information such as weather data, sensor measures, state/position/movements of incidents and operations, simulation results or statistical data added in real-time to the digital mock-up of the environment.
   

   

2. Implementing new interaction metaphors to navigate and interact with the displayed 2D/3D maps in the frame of crisis simulation or management situations. This includes the research and development of a new kind of device, an easily transportable interactive map table presented in the state-of-the-art section of this document.
3. Implementing new interaction metaphors to navigate and interact with the displayed 2D/3D maps in the frame of crisis simulation or management situations. This includes the research and development of a new kind of device, an easily transportable interactive map table presented in the state-of-the-art section of this document.
4. Implementing simulation modules that can be used for training purposes but also for decision-support during real-crises, and that can also consider units sent to the field.
5. Implementing interoperability modules in order to support systems and services such as third-party simulators (using DIS/HLA standards), radio-communication (e.g. UMTS, Tetra) and geo-localisation (GPS) servers, Geographic Information System (using OGC’s standards, KML) or Computer Aided Design system (CAD).
6. Integrating these modules in a robust, seamless, distributed and time-critical framework that will serve as a backbone for all types of crisis management activities.
7. Providing an INDIGO Software Developer Kit to enable third-parties to open and extend the system by implementing additional modules or gateways to other services and simulators.
8. Making the whole system run on entry level PCs or laptops, with the appropriate graphic board and hard drive.
9. Proposing a European emergency symbology reference for the visual representation of crisis information on 2D and 3D maps in synergy with the US Homeland Security Working Group which is involved in a similar initiative.
10. Validating the benefits of the proposed system on user-defined scenarios.