Decision-Support System for Safety and Security Assessment and Management in Smart Cities

Abstract

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.