Decision-support system for safety and security assessment and management in smart cities

Abstract

Counter-terrorism measures and preparedness play a critical role in securing mass gather ings, soft targets, and critical infrastructures within urban environments. This paper intro duces 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 preven tion and intervention stages of potential attacks. The decision support information provided encompasses various aspects, including optimal evacuation strategies, estimated egress times, pedestrian movement profles, probability assessments, and the potential impact of diferent terrorist threats in terms of casualties. Additionally, the system ofers real-time insights into the status of the trafc network under normal and unusual conditions, ena bling efcient emergency management throughout its progression. This includes the ability to identify optimal intervention routes and assess the impact of anomalous trafc resulting from evacuations