The EU-funded PREDICT - “Preparing for the Domino effect in Crisis Situations” - project will hold its final conference on 16 & 17 March 2017, in Brussels. This event jointly organised with 4 other European projects – CascEff, CIPRNet, FORTRESS and SnowBall – will present the key results of PREDICT and suggest recommendations on the future European research and policy agenda so as to assist the European crisis management community in responding to cascading effects.
Critical infrastructures providing vital services to societies and citizens are increasingly interdependent and therefore vulnerable to large-scale cascading effects, as illustrated by the Fukushima incident. This challenging environment requires crisis management organisations to adapt their procedures, processes and strategies.
The PREDICT project explored different ways to address these issues and offers solutions to help crisis managers in emergency and rescue services, national civil protection authorities and critical infrastructures preparing and planning for the unknown. Relying on innovative modelling and decision techniques, and realistic scenarios of crisis with multiple cascading effects, the PREDICT results aim to support crisis managers in their situation assessment, what-if reasoning and decision-making.
Key outcomes of PREDICT
The key results of the project are as follows:
The PREDICT incident evolution framework, which provides a threat quantification methodology allowing for the assessment of cascading effects and the modelling of interdependencies between critical infrastructures.
Improved versions of tools:
- SBR, a tool supporting the generation and analysis of most probable set of scenarios
- PROCeed, which enables crisis managers to model and run crisis scenarios on a Geographic Information System (GIS) web-interface,
- Myriad, a tool supporting decision-making by risk-based assessment of the current and predicted situation.
The Integrated PREDICT Tool Suite (iPDT), which successfully combined these tools to provide a solution enabling crisis managers to generate, run and analyze alternative scenarios of a given crisis, identify crucial dependencies between critical infrastructures, and act with a better understanding of the future.
End-users’ engagement
The PREDICT consortium gathered together SMEs, large industrial companies, crisis management organisations and RTOs and has worked in close cooperation with representatives stemming from public and private crisis management organisations across the European Union. In particular:
Three use cases have been designed to provide a realistic environment for the development of the PREDICT tools, and to demonstrate the added-value of iPDT to a representative audience of crisis managers.
Five workshops attracted more than 80 experts representing 45 different national and local crisis management organisations in Europe who were given the opportunity to test the PREDICT tools during hands-on sessions.
Throughout the PREDICT project, crisis management practitioners have thus followed the progress of work, exchanged best practices with their peers and assisted in defining common needs pertaining to the management of cascading effects.
This method of “co-development” ensured that the solutions developed in the project respond to the requirements and constraints of these professionals.
In addition to this, several papers have been published over the course of the project, ensuring that the results of PREDICT are usable and exploitable by the research community. These publications are available at http://www.predict-project.eu/publi
More information about the project and its results: www.predict-project.eu
Coordinator contact: Dominique SÉRAFIN - dominique.serafin@cea.fr
Website of the Final Joint Conference: www.cascadingeffects.eu
Press and Media contact: Martin de Maupeou – mdemaupeou@ceis.eu
