The Digital Systems for Crisis management and Security (DiSCS) axis focuses on how the use of digital technologies can contribute to the field of global security, in particular by contributing to risk management, crisis management and the resilience of socio-technical systems.
The aim of the Digital Systems for Crisis Management and Security (DiSCS) theme is to provide interdisciplinary solutions for the management of high-hazard or high-damage situations (whether crises impacting civil society, an organization or an industrial site, or humanitarian crises). The DiSCS axis sees the management of socio-technical systems as a continuous flow from data to action, via information and decision-making, supported by cross-disciplinary knowledge.
Fields of application
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Risk and crisis management training
This concerns the use of digital technologies for operational training and training in the use of digital technologies. In particular, it involves identifying the pedagogical components of training that could be improved by the scientific and technical contributions of the axis.
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Operational crisis management
This is the axis' most long-standing issue, involving the application of its principles and contributions to the management of critical situations, whether natural, industrial, institutional, civil or even military.
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Continuous hypervision of socio-technical systems
This theme focuses on the use of the Axis proposals for the continuous, integrated monitoring of socio-technical systems. Such monitoring is termed continuous because it aims to exploit as many sensors and actuators as possible simultaneously, in order to federate potentially proprietary and heterogeneous supervisory approaches into a single hypervision. This problem is based on immersive virtual and augmented reality technologies, GIS and the field of human-machine interaction.
Scientific challenges
The main scientific challenges are as follows:
- How can we aggregate, merge and finally interpret the masses of available data in order to build a reliable, comprehensive, exploitable and sustainable picture of a crisis situation? This scientific challenge focuses in particular on the classic components of big data (volume, velocity, variety and value) and includes more original aspects such as learning or deduction mechanisms, visualization, modeling and meta-modeling.
- How can we ensure the agility of crisis management in the face of situations that are as changeable and unstable as they are critical and dramatic? This second issue focuses on the dynamics of response networks, and includes considerations such as flexibility and robustness, as well as disruption detection and adaptation of collaborative schemes.
- How can crisis management IT tools be developed and deployed, taking advantage of current technological potential while integrating into the crisis management landscape in the least disruptive way possible? This third challenge covers both the purely technological aspect, with a view to proposing effective, high-performance tools, and the social science aspect inherent in questions of acceptability and business integration.
Methodological approaches
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Modeling
Model engineering is at the heart of the DiSCS axis. Methodological approaches based on metamodels, automatic model generation (situation, response, etc.) or model transformation are central to the axis.
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Organizational Digital Twin
The desire to build models that are representative of the observed situation, to keep these models as close as possible to the reality of the situation, and finally to act on this situation cover respectively the “Digital Model”, “Digital Shadow” and “Digital Twin” aspects of the Digital Twin methodological approach.
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Physics of Decision
The POD methodological approach is also strongly linked to the DiSCS axis and to the desire to support decision-making and performance evaluation.
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Participatory experimentation
The applied nature of DiSCS research and the need to interact with potential end-users of the contributions justify the use of methodological approaches based on the conduct of participatory experimental sequences.
- POSITIONING OF THE AXIS IN NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT
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The work carried out by this division is based on deep historical integration within local (e.g. SDIS 81, SDIS 62) and national (Ministry of Ecology, Ministry of the Interior, CEREMA) institutional networks.
On the industrial front, the maturity of the axis' contributions tends to direct collaborations towards joint research laboratories with major groups (Airbus, Dassault Systèmes), as well as smaller companies (EPSI).
On the academic front, international collaborations have been anchored for many years with Penn State University (USA) and Georgia Tech (USA); more recently with Virginia Tech (USA) via a co-directed thesis on critical infrastructure resilience, and with the University of Cincinnati (USA) via a co-directed thesis on crisis management training.
On a national level, thesis co-directions are underway with Télécom Paris and INU Champollion. The division is very much involved in the ISCRAM (Information System for Crisis Response And Management) community and in various GdRs.