Welcome to HEIMDALL

The management of complex crisis situations, with natural, accidental or intentional origin, generally require the participation and coordination of multiple first responder organisations, including, but not limited to: firefighting units, police departments, medical emergency services, civil protection units and command and control centres.
This heterogeneous group of first responders provide a varied set of expertise to handle crisis situations and pose different requirements in terms of timeliness and relevance of the needed information and interoperability among the organisations. Moreover, communication and information sharing involving additional stakeholders, such as the population at risk, become relevant to increase the overall situation awareness and population involvement. Therefore, efficient response planning, including the development of realistic scenarios, and response coordination shall take into account this multi-disciplinary context in order to provide information and tools for the wide range of stakeholders which can have an active or passive role in crisis management. In this regard, efficient inter-organisational coordination among first responders is essential for improving preparedness of societies to cope with complex crisis situations.

Considering this multi-disciplinary context, there is the need to provide integrated tools which can address the requirements of the different first responders involved in disaster risk management and can enhance cooperation and inter-organisational coordination, based on technologies already existing or currently under development. This integrated solution shall:

  • Support the already existing operational procedures for inter-organisational coordination, including cross-border scenarios, and implement new ones, if needed;
  • Provide means to define and share realistic scenarios and the corresponding response plans to be applied, covering the different perspectives of the involved first responders and the different phases of the disaster management cycle (preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery);
  • Integrate monitoring assets, based on satellite and aerial earth observation, in-situ sensors and information provided by first responders, to promptly detect and track any existing risk or ongoing emergency;
  • Apply available data fusion techniques and modelling algorithms to improve situation and risk assessment and identify the relevant scenarios available and the corresponding response plans to be applied, based on decision support techniques.
  • Allow information sharing and communication among the relevant stakeholders, including first responders deployed on the field and the population at risk, thus enhancing stakeholder and population awareness.

HEIMDALL addresses the challenge of providing integrated tools for emergency planning and management, including the definition and sharing of multi-disciplinary scenarios, and addressing the needs of the involved first responders (firefighting units, police departments, medical emergency services, civil protection units and command and control centres) and relevant stakeholders in terms of interoperability, inter-organisational coordination and information sharing.