“A small cause may have a big effect!” – Decision-makers in crisis situations and Critical Infrastructure organisations must consider many factors: political, social, legal, cultural, ethical and economic parameters are always to be considered during threat assessments and countermeasures.

Therefore, the aim of the PREDICT project (PREparing of the Domino Effect in Crisis siTuations: 2014-2017) was to provide a comprehensive solution for dealing with cascading effects in multi-sectoral crisis situations covering aspects of critical infrastructures. The project ended with the final review, which took place on 18 May 2017 in Poznan, Poland.

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 analyse alternative scenarios of a given crisis, identify crucial dependencies between critical infrastructures, and act with a better understanding of the future.

The functions of the iPDT have been carefully assessed against acknowledged training tool requirement. It has the potential to train end-users in awareness, understanding and decision-making by visualising the impact of the decisions on the further development of the situation.

Regarding the interest of our UIC-members, the UIC Security Division drafted a summary, which gives them a good overview of the main aspects and further results from the PREDICT project. You can find it on our website, using the following link: http://uic.org/IMG/pdf/predict_brochure.pdf

UIC Security Additional Programme and Security Week 2017:

Furthermore, Crisis Management is a core issue of the UIC Security Additional Programme (2016 – 2017). The UIC Security Division published in April 2017 a benchmark study about the Crisis Management efforts within the railway community, available at http://www.uic.org/IMG/pdf/crisis_management_report.pdf.

Also during the Security Week, which will take place on 6 – 9 June 2017 in Paris, Crisis Management will be discussed. The detailed agenda is on the website at http://events.uic.org/uic-security-week-2017.