Modelling crisis management for improved action and preparedness

In recent years, the nature and magnitude of crises have changed globally, sometimes even drastically. Thus, crisis managers and other decision-makers are more and more likely to face large-scale crisis situations that would exceed the capacity of any local crisis management. CRISMA has been developed to enable crisis managers and other stakeholders model and simulate complex crisis scenarios and alternative response and mitigation actions in a realistic way. CRISMA aims to improve preparedness and resilience to crisis events by facilitating the manipulation and visualisation of complex crisis scenarios, which typically have multiple effects on society and require the integration of expertise from multiple sectors, and involve financial and ethical concerns. The CRISMA Framework has been built to provide an environment that enables building up one's own crisis scenarios and integrating both new and legacy models and tools into the one simulation system. With the CRISMA Framework, crisis managers and other decision-makers are offered possibilities to combine models, data and expertise from many different sources, for creating a wider perception of crisis scenarios and alternative preparedness, response and mitigation actions. Impact comparison and visualisation improves multiorganisational cooperation and communication with other stakeholders and the public. This publication presents an overview on CRISMA solutions and how they can be used in real-life examples. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 284552.