ESS · Emergency Support System

The Emergency Support System (ESS) is a suite of real-time data-centric technologies which will provide actionable information to crisis managers during abnormal events. This information will enable improved control and management, resulting in real time synchronization between forces on the ground (police, rescue, firefighters) and out-of-theater command and control centers (C&C). The approach guiding the ESS project is based on the fusion of variable forms of field-derived data within a central system which will then provide information analysis and decision support applications at designated C&C locations. To do this, ESS will achieve the following objectives: i) Improvement of front end data collection technologies (radioactivity, bio-chemical, audio-video, etc.) installed both on portable and fixed platforms, providing a flexible yet comprehensive coverage of the affected area; ii) this data will then be fused and analyzed to provide real-time decision support; iii) ESS will make these resources readily available to commanders through the use of easily accessible web-portals. Thus, ESS will minimize the uncertainty that characterizes crisis events, thereby limiting their scope. The ESS will then be field tested at three different scenarios, including a stadium evacuation, a forest fire and toxic waste dump accidents. The ESS consortium consists of 19 partners that will bring together a wide spectrum of European SME’s, industrial and academic partners from a variety of fields, ranging from sensor design and electronic communications to civil protection. The resulting cooperation will help provide an added measure of security to European citizens. Crisis situations are characterized by partial information according to which commanders need to make life and death decisions. By helping decision makers make decisions based on better and more complete data, ESS will help limit the scope of crises, ultimately saving precious lives.