HEIMDALL aims at improving preparedness of societies to cope with complex crisis situations by providing a flexible platform for multi-hazard emergency planning and management, which makes use of innovative technologies for the definition of multi-disciplinary scenarios and response plans, providing integrated assets to support emergency management, such as monitoring, modelling, situation and risk assessment, decision support and communication tools. HEIMDALL fosters data and information sharing among the relevant stakeholders, maximises the accuracy of valuable information and improves population awareness.
With the aim of successfully achieving this overall purpose, HEIMDALL will address the following key aspects: (i) improved data and information access and sharing among the involved stakeholders, including the population and first responders on the field; (ii) better understanding of the situation by using advanced multi-hazard methods to develop realistic multi-disciplinary scenarios, risk and vulnerability assessment, information sharing and emergency response; (iii) recognising the value of information by advanced data fusion, situation assessment and decision support tools. The combination of these aspects will be integrated in a modular and highly flexible platform which will make use of a federated architecture to provide user-tailored interfaces and foster information sharing among the involved stakeholders. Additionally, the platform will provide citizens at risk and first responders on the field with valuable incident-related information, increasing population awareness.
The HEIMDALL Approach:
The challenging HEIMDALL objectives will be achieved by following a detailed system engineering process, based on an iterative version of the well-established Vee model for system engineering (Figure 1) and a close cooperation with the relevant stakeholders (first responders), both the consortium partners and the members of the Advisory Board. The diagram in Figure 2 depicts the interaction between the system engineering and the stakeholder management layers. The HEIMDALL system engineering process has defined a series of milestones for the system development, namely, the initial system specification, three intermediate releases and the final release. These milestones are aligned with interactions with the relevant stakeholders (partners with first responder profiles and Advisory Board members), by means of the planned Advisory Board and End Users workshops. Therefore, the outcome of the different workshops will be used to perform preliminary system demonstrations to evaluate the preliminary releases and gather end user feedback until the final operational demonstration.
