CRITECH

Keywords

Crisis Management: from preparedness and early warning to response; Web technologies; GIS modelling; numerical modelling; epidemiological modeling for emerging health threats, Digital Mapping; Early Warning and Alerting Systems; Information Management Systems for Collaborative Decision-Making in Crisis Management.

Overview

The CRITECH action focuses on the development and testing of solutions to enhance decision-making in crisis management including experimenting with information retrieval techniques, real-time data stream prioritisation/visualisation, numerical modelling systems, and visualisation/display systems. The solutions also include developing and testing Web-based platforms for sharing, managing, disseminating crisis relevant information in a number of external environments that are involved in operational crisis management and related decision making. These solutions, including early warning and alerting systems, require key technologies such as Web 2.0 and information technologies, geo-information technologies (including GIS) and numerical modelling, which constitute the core scientific competences of the Action.
The general aim of the CRITECH action is to provide scientific support to EU policies concerned with crisis (from humanitarian natural disasters and public health crises to conflict and political crises) management, especially the Community Instrument for Stability, the Community Humanitarian Aid Instrument, the Community Disaster Risk Reduction Initiative, the Community Action Plan on Reinforcing the Union’s disaster response capacity, the Community public health programme, and the external security dimension of GMES. 

The Action’s current-to-medium policy focus is to provide S+T support to:

• Community Contributions to International crisis/disaster preparedness/response and Global disaster risk reduction initiatives: focusing on early warning systems and Information Management Systems for Decision-Making in Crisis Management
• Community Contribution to enhanced public health crisis preparedness and response: focusing on modelling systems and Information Management Systems for Collaborative Decision-Making in Crisis Management
• The EU’s institutions (including specific agencies such as ECDC and FRONTEX, Council Secretariat General Joint Situation Centre, European Commission (SANCO, ENV/Monitoring Information Centre-MIC, ECHO, and RELEX) and their International partners (UN agencies such as OCHA and DPKO; African Union) crisis centres/situation rooms. 

The action’s medium-to-longer term policy focus will be to extend its policy support to also include:

• EU-Africa partnership 1 on peace and security: crisis management
• the international security dimension of climate change (Solana, 2008):  increased disasters (natural, public health crises) and human vulnerability to disasters in high disaster risk, poor and developing countries;

At the EU policy level, the action is contributing towards the Community and international instruments and initiatives concerned with enhancing the EU’s capacity and its partners in crisis/disaster risk reduction, preparedness and response.

The Action addresses disasters and crises in the following way:

• Early Warning, Alerting and Modelling Systems: specific natural disasters, mainly earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones and to some extent floods, and public health threats
• Collaborative Crisis Management solutions and systems (collaborative platforms, field-based tools, and situation rooms): all types of crises and disasters.

For more information about the activities developed by CRITECH during 2008 and the challenges for 2009, read CRITECH Annual Report 2008.

Scientific and Technical scope

The CRITECH action focuses on developing and testing solutions to enhance decision-making in crisis management; preparedness, early warning and response. The solutions under development and testing include experimenting with information retrieval techniques, real-time data stream prioritisation/visualisation, numerical modelling systems, and visualisation/display systems in order to see how they impact the performance of collaborative crisis management including decision-making, typically in situation centre/crisis room environments. The solutions also include developing and testing Web-based platforms for sharing, managing, disseminating crisis relevant information in a number of external environments that are involved in operational crisis management and related decision making. These platforms and early warning and alerting systems combine the Action’s R+D and expertise on Web 2.0 and information technologies, geo-information technologies (including GIS) and numerical modelling.

Since 9/11 and the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, the EU has been under increasing pressure to enhance its ability to react quickly and effectively to disasters and crises both within its territories and in third countries. This expectation has grown and is expected to grow further due to the potential impact of climate change on increased incidence of humanitarian disasters and susceptibility to instability and political crises. Furthermore, the EU is expected today to have the capacity to not only to respond to a range of disasters but also to play an increasingly visible role in preventing them and reducing the associated risks. Numerical modelling, GIS, and information and Web 2.0 technologies play an essential contribution towards building effective and relevant, systems for:

• the identification and detection of risks and hazards that have the potential to develop into disasters
• the communication of early warnings and alerts to relevant stakeholders involved in disaster response
• the modelling the potential impact of specific crises and disasters
• for collaborative crisis management and decision-making

Action's specific themes

• Geo-visual and field gathering tools

Geospatial data infrastructure

CRITECH holds a large amount of geographical data which may serve more Commission Services in better ways. CRITECH will evaluate and deploy the latest GIS technologies (commercial or open source) for map and image servers, web mapping (including 3D such as Google Earth or World Wind), geo-processing, search and retrieval and sharing of its data. These basic activities are extremely important to ensure the success of the applications offered to our clients. Existing databases need to be constantly upgraded and new databases have to be purchased and installed in order to keep the quality of our tools at high level. These Geo Spatial infrastructure is the basis for all the evaluation activities that we perform in the early warning / alerting systems the action is developing: any time that there is an earthquake the spatial infrastructure is invoked in order to generate the appropriate maps, to evaluate the impact on the population and to identify the affected locations. The availability of an efficient and updated Geospatial infrastructure is essential for the success of the early warning / alerting systems.

The objective is the maintenance of the existing geospatial data infrastructure, including the updating of datasets and upgrading of software, and to further develop it reflecting apt advances in the field.

Field-based data Gathering tools to support crisis needs assessment

In the aftermath of a crisis, field missions are performed for all types of crisis related assessments, including support, logistics and peace keeping. During crisis management, it is important to have data exchanged between headquarters and field teams in the most efficient and secure way. While teams are in the field, it is important to keep track of their work to shorten the time needed to have an overall assessment and to better serve the teams with local maps or overall pictures.

CRITECH will develop and test Field tracking tools to serve the above purposes. The main application which initiated in 2008 with requirements developed by UNDPKO, will be further improved and will be tested in field missions. Main functionalities will include: a) maps preparation (what does this means?) with the ability for communication with servers, b) data  collection in the field with a standard PDA; c) data integration on the server and visualisation on web-based platforms typically located in situation centres and crisis rooms.

• Situation and Secure Room Models

In 2009, the CRITECH action will be fitted with a Situation Room Model in addition to its current Secure Room Model. The Secure Room Model will be dedicated to several supporting functions, such as hosting critical servers and for a secure working environment where to handle/store restricted/classified documents on the basis of restricted access. The development of the Situation Room Model will allow the Action to design a state of the art crisis monitoring/response infrastructure in which it will be possible to adopt the most advanced technologies in the field of visualization and collaborative intelligence and analysis work. The Situation Room will be accessible on a controlled basis and host visualization peripherals providing multiple crisis/events watch/alert capabilities on real cases and also act as a training facility.

The model arrangement will enable the Action to undertake a more strategic position in developing, testing and providing simulation and training tools as well as solutions for the collaborative management of crises.

The arrangement will also enable distributed training of crisis management across relevant DG services and between DG services and its partners in the EU MSs and others in crisis management thereby enhancing the awareness amongst them of the role technological solutions can play in strengthening crisis management. The arrangement will also allow specific DG services to make use of the Secure and Situation Room facilities to back up their own systems as well as to use in the case of emergencies and loss of access to their own systems and facilities for a number of reasons.

The objective is the setup of the Situation Room Model and the testing of several Crisis Management software tools: home made tools but also software developed by other companies. The Situation Room Model will become a European reference test bench for crisis management,

• Crisis Information Management Systems

The CRITECH action is developing and testing platforms in operational scenario modes in order to test their applicability for solving real time crisis management requirements such as dynamic exchange of data and information, collaborative tools and others such as mapping tools.

Examples of these applications are the KREIOS and HEDIS platforms. KREIOS is a web-based platform that allows critical organisations involved in international crisis management to exchange unique information on world crisis areas. These platforms have proved to be an extremely useful communication channel among the Situation Centres and Crisis Rooms. HEDIS is also a crisis management platform developed for DG SANCO that allows communication and management of health crisis related information among health authorities in Europe. The combined crisis management platform, HEDIS, and epidemiological modelling environment provides an excellent platform for crisis preparedness and response: e.g. capturing signals from the information system HEDIS, performing short and medium term assessments using mapping, statistical and modelling tools available in HEDIS, and creating and sharing situation reports through the HEDIS platform.

The scientific challenges in collaborative environments are mainly twofold: (1) optimal user interaction and (2) interoperability among platforms for data sharing. The first challenge is to improve the ease in using collaborative platforms for crisis management. A lot of research has been done in this field for social networking websites (Web 2.0). CRITECH is adapting existing approaches and developing innovative techniques (e.g. Wiki mapping) tailored to the specific needs of crisis management platforms. The second challenge lies in the field of system architecture and focuses on using and developing standards for exchanging data among different platforms, taking into account the stringent security requirements typical for crisis management environments.

The objective is the development of new modules that will be included in the various applications such as KREIOS, MIC-ENV, Eu SitCen Portal or the Africa Union. These modules include models for automatic chart generation, module for secure chat, module for Single Sign On (SSO) global authentication.

• Early Warning Systems

Disasters/crisis early warning and alerting models are useful in shortening the decision-making time and enhancing crisis/disaster response. Reliable informatics systems and physical models are essential in order to reach the objective, as in the most cases the short time available does not allow one to set-up complicated analyses. More often than not, geographical information systems play a key role in collecting, processing and visualizing spatial information related to disastrous events. The combination of a state-of-the-art geospatial data infrastructure and physical models available as web services, allows the development of impact models using Internet technology. An example is the Global Disaster Alerting and Coordination Systems (GDACS) whose models automatically analyse specific global natural disaster events and determine their severity. GDACS is a multi-hazard system that combines expertise and models for earthquakes, tropical cyclones, tsunamis and volcanoes

Tsunami Modelling 

In the case of a potential Tsunami, a pre-calculated scenario database is used to estimate wave height and travel time wave and identify the coasts at risk. At the same time a calculation is automatically performed with more refined initial parameters. For other disasters, in particular meteorological disasters such as floods and tropical cyclones, there is a further need to improve impact analysis using new data sources such as near-real time satellite imagery. The collaboration with Portuguese authority and other similar authorities will continue, which will serve to further test the tsunami modelling environment the JRC has been developing to enhance the ability for real-time tsunami early warning and alerting.

In 2009, the action will focus on (a) developing a user friendly Tsunami Analysis System; and (b) developing the interface with the new device for Tsunami alerting that has been developed and patented by the JRC in 2008; (c) further improving the underpinning Tsunami model with a more detailed model for the crust deformation and movement. 

Global Flood Detection System

The Global Flood detection system that the Action has been developing in the last 2 years is currently an experimental system based on near-real time and global passive microwave remote sensing. The system is sensitive to increased water surfaces and can therefore detect riverine floods. It has been successfully applied to coastal flooding in the case of tropical cyclone Nargis in Myanmar (2008). In order to evolve from its current experimental state, new techniques must be developed to statistically and quantitatively process the input satellite data to derive areas of concern in an automatic way. This will allow the use of the system as a Global flood detection and alert system, providing alerts within 24h of the occurrence of the flood. In addition, the technology is able to provide early flood maps by identifying flooded river sections (of about 10km in size). This, in turn, can be coupled with emergency mapping activities, either through alerting relevant organisations or through triggering very-high-resolution satellite acquisitions in an automatic way. This work is distinct but complementary to the work on floods performed in IES (in particular the European Flood Alert System) in the following ways. Firstly, CRITECH focuses on flood detection rather than flood forecasting, which is currently not feasible on a global scale. The methodology developed by CRITECH is based on detecting increases in water surface extent from satellite imagery, and not on modelling potential floods with hydrological and meteorological models. Secondly, the geographic scope of the flood detection system is global, in order to have a comprehensive and complete overview of major ongoing floods in the world, in particular in developing countries that might benefit from humanitarian aid provided by the European Union. Finally, the target audience for the CRITECH system is the community of international first responders, including search and rescue workers, humanitarian aid donors and relief workers. The Global Flood detection system will be integrated in GDACS.

In 2009, a completely automatic Satellite data processing system will be implemented in order to be able to publish on GDACS recent flood maps in the shortest possible time, without any human intervention. For this, the current methodology for point based flood detection will be further developed to identify flooded areas from microwave brightness temperature images.

• Public Health Security

In the area of public heath security, the action’s work focuses on emerging public health threats. Epidemiologic models are used to estimate the number of cases in a pandemic such as SARS or Influenza. Via such models, it is important to be able to identify if the cases could degenerate into an epidemic and to model the impact of control measures. The mathematical modelling approaches under development and testing in the action provide an analysis of the impact of the spread and control of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. This epidemiological assessment in conjunction with surveillance data provided from European institutions such as the European Centre for Disease Control (ECDC) allows decision makers to take appropriate prevention or intervention measures. Until now, the CRITECH action has focussed on the assessment of infectious diseases outbreaks and epidemiological modelling. An example of this type of activity was the assessment of the 2007 chikungunya outbreak in Italy. Similar work was performed for the influenza virus investigating intervention scenarios and monkey pox outbreaks. The latter was carried out within the framework of a major European exercise organized by the EU Council. 

In 2009, the action focuses on the assessment of emerging and re-emerging infectious disease models (e.g. for influenza) and vector-borne diseases such as Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever and chikungunya in southern Europe, West Nile Virus in Europe), in order to progressively enhance the JRC’s modelling database, which is invoked in the case of an emergency by means of the web based modelling tool (DESMOS), which will also undergo further development; the medium term aim is to provide a user friendly modelling environment which public health officials can use to run a variety of modelling scenarios in order to assess the potential impact, specific epidemics may have on public health. A scenario exercise representing a pandemic case will be elaborated and executed within the action, in order to prove and check the response capacity to health emergency.