Management Decision Support for Critical Infrastructures (MEDSI) is an FP6 Specifically Targeted Research or Innovation Project (STREP) funded by the European Commission. It started in January 2004, and will be finished in June 2005. Consortium undertaking the project is formed by 11 partners from 8 different countries.

Intro Solutions is the leader of System Analysis and Design work-package, which is one of the 8 work packages in the project. This work package amounts for 22% of the total project effort.

Besides participating in management related activities Intro Solutions is also an active participant in research and development activities. Total effort of Intro Solutions in this part of the project ranks second after the project coordinator.

Following sections summarize the need for such a project and the objectives of the project.

Need for the project

Asymmetric threats which represents a change in world politics has started gaining more importance after the last terrorist attacks. In the current situation asymmetric threats, stemming mainly from terrorist activities demand more attention than classical war threats. Probability of using critical infrastructures and civil population as weapons to disrupt life and economy, calls for immediate solutions in crisis and emergency management domain.

One of the most important things in crisis management is timely and accurate response to the crises. In order to accomplish this; information flow between data sources and crisis management center is essential. Furthermore accurate infrastructure knowledge of and uninterrupted information flow between areas regardless of the geographical situation and size (i.e. a small town, a country or Europe) are required. The problem with this schema is not lack of information; many companies and governmental bodies have such information both in quality and quantity.

Unfortunately existing tools in this domain are not capable enough to bring all the relevant information to the fingertips of crisis managers in a timely and integrated manner. Moreover the need in this domain cannot be satisfied with separate tools; the required information management and decision support capabilities can only be provided with a framework that is missing in the current situation.

The problems and requirements mentioned above form the basis for MEDSI. The project primarily aims to develop a state of the art framework to enable data and information flow between different bodies involved in the crisis management domain and to unify data sources, geographical information and critical infrastructures.

Objectives

The overall aim of the MEDSI Project is development of a framework which will provide an integrated set of services to crisis managers and planners, especially to protect the critical infrastructures, territories against classical threats such as flooding or other natural disasters as well as terrorist attacks.

MEDSI will enable utilization of various information sources for better monitoring and reduction risks, both potential and actual, and for more effective response to crises. MEDSI will also be capable to create, maintain and optimise the typical crisis scenarios simulating the real-world crises

The framework being developed will enable integration of geospatial, organizational and operational data. The project makes use of current standards and aims to improve them. The rationale behind working closely with standards is to provide a baseline upon which other features can be added easily and to provide interoperability with existing systems.

MEDSI aims to be flexible enough to be used in both large governmental bodies and small but critical organizations. This flexibility will be provided using standardized interfaces, messaging systems and web-services.

One other problem in the current situation is fast and effective communication and coordination between the parties involved in this domain, the tools that will be provided as part of MEDSI aims to overcome this problem by using messaging systems and tracking the usage of resources on situation and thematic maps.