UIC represented by Mr José Pires (Senior Advisor within the UIC Security Division), participated in the PREDICT project 1st periodic review on 9 June at the Research Executive Agency (REA) in Brussels.
The main aim of the periodic review is to perform an overview of the project progress (following the delivery of the periodic report) by the consortium partners, including a publishable summary of the progress of work towards the objectives of the project, including achievements and attainment of any milestones and deliverables for the period.
The review panel was composed of an EC Project Officer and two designated technical reviewers, experts on crisis management and emergency response.
The PREDICT project started from an in-depth analysis of recent cases (over 8500 incidents worldwide), which will be accompanied by scenarios of potential crisis. Project partners will set up a generic approach (common framework) to prevent or mitigate cascading effects which will be applied in selected cases agreed with end-users. As modeling each phenomenon separately in a specific environment is not effective, the PREDICT project will propose cohesive and comprehensive models of dependencies, cascading effects and common mode failure which will include causal relations, multi-sector infrastructure elements and environment parameters, as well as the human factor aspects.
The main project results are to deliver software tools bundled in the PREDICT Incident Evolution Tool, which will consist of two core components:
- Foresight and Prediction Tool (for simulation of the evolution of cascading effects and impact on multi-sector dependencies) and
- Decision-Support Tool (for determining the best course of action and to calculate the risk associated with them)
The quality of the developed solutions will also be ensured by the strong involvement of end-users (UIC security division in the rail sector) in the project.
End-users will intervene at three levels:
- Partners of the consortium
- Members of the Advisory Board, and
- Representatives from relevant organisations across Europe invited to regular workshops
The workshops will be focusing on understanding how the incident evolution can be observed, predicted and communicated at the prevention and response levels. Indeed, predicting and addressing potential cascading effects in crisis situation requires a comprehensive view of the evolution and a better understanding of the key phases of a crisis. By taking stock of existing solutions and exploring innovative methods in this field, end-users will be able to exchange best practices and express operational requirements on incident evolution solutions designed to improve their capability to mitigate potential cascading effects and thus facilitate their daily work.
Within that scope, a railway incident scenario will be analysed in a dedicated workshop (October 2015), to study how the Decision-Support Tool PREDICT will interact and possibly enhance with the crisis management protocols in place. That workshop will bring together the participation of railways, first responders, civil protection and local and national authorities.
Regarding the periodic review, the experts and EC Project Officer presented a positive opinion, providing good advice in a constructive way to consolidate and improve the good work presented so far.
The mid-term review of PREDICT will be around March-April 2016.
