The Security and Crisis Management Axis provides agile and interdisciplinary solutions to crisis management.

Two main dimensions are taken into account in the pursuit of this ambition:

• Temporal dimension

Traditionally, crisis management is divided into four phases:

1. Prevention
2. Preparation (coupled with prevention)
3. Response (which follows the occurrence of a dramatic event and ends the two previous phases)
4. Recovery (following the response phase)

The CGI is dedicated to the first 3 phases of crisis management.

• Collaborative dimension

Crisis management is a discipline that may involve institutional (fire brigade), private (second intervention team on sensitive sites), independent (NGOs or volunteers) players. In this context, the coordination of the players depends on their interoperability and four levels of associated abstraction: cultural/social, organizational, behavioral and technological.

The coordination of the players is mainly concerned with the last three levels (organizational with the modeling of collaborative networks, behavioral with the modeling of business processes, and technological with the deployment of mediation information systems).

 

Objective

The objective of the Security and Crisis Management Axis is to provide interdisciplinary solutions for the management of situations with high dangerousness or high damage (whether they are crises impacting civil society, an organization or an industrial site, or humanitarian crises).

 

Scientific obstacles

To date, crisis management has been very effective in exploiting data from controlled or institutional sources. Moreover, single-incident crisis management plans are also highly relevant. Finally, existing technological tools are well mastered and well-integrated into the practices of crisis managers.

On the other hand, the management of emerging and heterogeneous data sources (social networks, non-dedicated captors, etc.), the agility of procedures and response capacities, and the maturity of IT tools dedicated to crisis management, are still very inadequate in relation to the potential offered.

In this context, the main scientific obstacles are as follows:

1. How to aggregate, merge and finally interpret the masses of available data in order to build a reliable, comprehensive, exploitable and consistent picture of a crisis situation? This scientific issue focuses in particular on the classical 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.
2. How to 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, but also the detection of disruption and the adaptation of collaborative schemes.
3. How to develop and deploy IT tools for crisis management that exploit current technological potentialities while blending in the crisis management scene in the least disruptive way possible? This third issue focuses both on the purely technological aspect in order to propose efficient and effective tools, but also on the social science aspect involved in issues of acceptability and business integration.

POSITIONING OF THE AXIS IN NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT

The collaborative history is very rich on the topic of crisis management.

In addition to past industrial collaborations (Thales Communication & Security, Linagora) or academic collaborations (INRIA Sophia, NTUA) and more necessarily current but which do not predict the future, active collaborations on these topics are really very numerous:

National academies: IRIT, IMT Mines Alès, Telecom ParisTech International academies: Agder, TU Delft, Penn State University, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech. 

Not to mention the very strong involvement in the ISCRAM (Information System for Crisis Response And Management) community.

• National institutions: Ministry of Ecology, Ministry of the Interior, CEREMA, BRGM
• International Institutions: IFRC
• National Industrial: Immersive Factory, Report One, Predict, Iterop
• International Industrial: Atos, Nissatech 

 

A team of experts