A new three-year project, funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Programme, will seek to build a system that can better respond to urgent natural and manmade crises. IN-PREP (INtegrated next generation PREParedness programme), which was launched in Athens on 27 September, will research and develop tools to respond to three urgent challenges related to transboundary crisis management: Sharing response planning across borders and agencies, improved sharing of accurate and relevant information in real time, and improved coordination of critical and scarce resources. The Fraunhofer Institute for Technological Trend Analysis INT will have the task to analyse the conditions of crises and to identify factors for an enhanced reaction.

Both natural and manmade crises are changing in scale, frequency and ferocity. Many of these crises do not respect country boundaries. The combination of the impact of climate change, cyber-attacks and targeted terrorist activity demand an urgent improvement in the response to transboundary crisis management. Through IN-PREP, tools will be developed to respond to these urgent challenges and support those with the onerous responsibility of managing these life-threatening crisis situations. A Training platform will be created and a handbook of operations will be delivered covering the training process of practitioners through various crisis scenarios.

Fraunhofer INT will be mainly responsible for the identification of success and failure factors in responding to crises and also for getting an understanding of the organizational, social and human factors relevant for the development of the IN-PREP system. Furthermore, Fraunhofer INT will lead the preparation of the IN-PREP handbook of transboundary preparedness and response operations.

Speaking at the launch of IN-PREP in Athens Angelos Amditis, a Director of ICCS, and coordinator of the project said “the goal of IN-PREP is to implement new training processes by bringing together existing components, knowledge and experience to create a novel tool that can help people share information and resources across country boundaries while responding to crisis situations.”

Evangelos Sdongos, responsible for the day-to-day coordination of the project said “It’s about bringing new tools for optimising preparedness through collaborative planning and thus upgrading the capacity to respond. Civil protection practitioners, representing 35% of the consortium, drive IN-PREP developments. During the project, we will have many activities to engage relevant participants outside the consortium to take part in the training programmes and validate our approach. We are warmly inviting you to follow us for the 36-month journey of the project”.

About IN-PREP (Integrated tools for response planning and scenario building)

The IN-PREP consortium is made up of 20 partners from 7 countries in the EU. It comprises seven crisis management practitioners and technology providers. Guided by feedback from practitioners, they will create a Mixed Reality Preparedness Platform; a novel IT-based tool for response planning and scenario building to integrate Command and Control and Information systems, Situational Awareness modules, and a Decision Support mechanism.

In addition, IN-PREP will create a Cross-organisational Handbook of Transboundary Preparedness and Response Operations. The principal aim for both outputs is to improve preparedness with realistic training in realistic scenarios of disasters and causes of crises. This will improve the coordination of response actions and support the work of those with this responsibility. Practitioners are very interested and engaged in building this platform as it promises to get the right information to the right people at the right time during these crisis events.

The Fraunhofer INT offers science-based analysis and assessment capabilities across the entire technical development spectrum. In-house expert analyses and prognoses in select fields of technology as well as theoretical and experimental work in the fields of electromagnetic and nuclear effects will flesh out this summary.

For more information on IN-PREP and to follow the progress of the project, visit http://www.in-prep.eu/ and twitter @INPREP_EU.

For further information please contact:
Angelos Amditis, (Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, Athens, Greece) a.amditis@iccs.gr

Evangelos Sdongos, (Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, Athens, Greece) evangelos.sdongos@iccs.gr

Johanna Varghese, (Carr Communications, Dublin, Ireland): johanna@carrcommunications.ie
+35317728900

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