A decision support framework for ImproviNg Cross-border Area resilience to disasters. – INCA

The aim of the project is to contribute to the understanding and to the enhancing of cross-border area resilience with regard to the risk of disasters with considering two topics in particular the resilience of medical dependent citizens and the management of volunteers in a cross-border area. Scientific knowledge and decision-makers contribution to cross border areas resilience to disasters will be enhanced with an interdisciplinary approach combining conceptual and empirical researches, decision support system engineering and a campaign of experiments.

Results of the project will be novel models for the thematic of cross border area resilience and on the perspective of medical dependent citizen and volunteers; a decision support system constituted of an assessment tool and a multi-agents system based simulation software; a set of experiments rapports on the utility, usability and acceptability of the solution developed and practical experience for resilience to disaster stakeholders.

Project will be conducted by a team constituted of two German institutes (KIT and University of Wuppertal) and two French institutes (ARMINES / Mines Paristech and Paris-Dauphine University). Project will be monitor by a steering committee constituted of representative of relevant stakeholders (NGO’s, local government representative, experts on disaster resilience). We focus on a reference region in the French-German border geographical area.

The overall work plan is structured in work packages. The first work package aims at building a shared culture of cross border areas resilience to disasters by the mean of a state of the art review and definition of key concepts and associated scenarios.

Then three interconnected work packages structure activities of the project.

Engineering-based work package (WP2) aiming at the definition and the development of the decision support system for managing medical dependent citizen and volunteers in cross border area constituted of a multi-agents system based simulator developed by KIT IKET and a method for assessing and enhancing cross border areas resilience to disaster performance developed by ARMINES.

Social-sciences-based work package (WP3) aiming at conducting a multi-disciplinary empirical study about medical dependant citizen and volunteer management in the context of cross border area resilience to disasters conducted by Paris-Dauphine University, KIT IIP and University of Wuppertal.

Experiments-based work package (WP4) aiming at testing, calibrating and validating utility, usability and acceptability of the decision-support system developed conducted by ARMINES and KIT IKET with the support of the other partners.

A synthesis of scientific, empirical, experimental and operational results of the project will be realized in the last phase of the project in order allowing the definition of the transfer means of the results to potential end users such as city organisations and other players. Efforts will be made to communicate the result of the project in both scientific and industrial journals and symposia.