Visual Public Protection Disaster Relief and Critical Infrastructure

Modern society is increasingly dependent on critical infrastructure and on the services that it provides. The loss of one of these services may hit the public immediately in manners which are not always predictable. Furthermore, the amount of time that a given service is unavailable will affect other services through numerous direct and indirect dependencies, which are seldom considered. Natural or man-made disasters, and combinations of both, will have effects that are difficult or impossible to foresee without the appropriate tools. Due to the rapid progress in electronic communications and information technology, one would expect today’s crisis managers to have access to situational awareness and to the tools needed to inform their decisions. While much has been achieved for single-service operational headquarters like those of police, firefighting and ambulance services, there are no solutions that address the interactions and interdependencies of all critical functions and all critical infrastructure in a Public Protection and Disaster Response context. If a crisis develops when some aspect of critical infrastructure is partly or completely unavailable, crisis managers must make decisions using a very different framework compared to that used to handle limited incidents in normal times. Considering the difficulties resulting from the dependencies and interdependencies of critical infrastructure in normal times, making good decisions is becoming more and more difficult for crisis managers during a crisis. These challenges, combined with the enormous and possibly tragic consequences of suboptimal crisis management, provide good reasons to explore the subject.