Counter-terrorism measures and preparedness play a critical role in securing mass gatherings, soft targets, and critical infrastructures within urban environments. This paper introduces a comprehensive Decision Support System developed as part of the S4AllCitites project, designed to seamlessly integrate with existing legacy systems in Smart Cities. The system encompasses urban pedestrian and vehicular evacuation, incorporating predictive models to anticipate the progression of incendiary and mass shooting attacks, alongside a probabilistic model for threat assessment in the case of improvised explosive devices. A notable achievement of this research is the successful implementation and deployment of the system in operational environments through pilot studies. It empowers public and private security operators with real time decision support capabilities during both prevention and intervention stages of potential attacks. The decision support information provided encompasses various aspects, including optimal evacuation strategies, estimated egress times, pedestrian movement profiles, probability assessments, and the potential impact of different terrorist threats in terms of casualties. Additionally, the system offers real-time insights into the status of the traffic network under normal and unusual conditions, enabling efficient emergency management throughout its progression. This includes the ability to identify optimal intervention routes and assess the impact of anomalous traffic resulting from evacuations.
Counter-terrorism and its preventive and response actions are crucial factors in security planning and protection of mass events, soft targets and critical infrastructures in urban environments. This paper presents a comprehensive Decision Support System developed under the umbrella of the S4AllCitites project, that can be integrated with legacy systems deployed in the Smart Cities. The system includes urban pedestrian and vehicular evacuation, considering ad-hoc predictive models of the evolution of incendiary and mass shooting attacks in conjunction with a probabilistic model for threat assessment in case of improvised explosive devices. The main objective of the system is to provide decision support to public or private security operators in the planning and real time phases in the prevention or intervention against a possible attack, providing information on evacuation strategies, the probability or expected impact of terrorist threats and the state of the traffic network in normal or unusual conditions allowing the emergency to be managed throughout its evolution.
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