Modern societies are confronted with an increasing number of abnormal events, crises, disasters and catastrophes. Such extreme events are marked by threats to societies’ values and/or life-sustaining functions and create an urgent need to respond to them under conditions of severe uncertainty.

In case of an abnormal event, it is the responsibility of public authorities to manage the response operation in order to save lives and restore a sense of order. In the first years of this millennium, a spate of extreme events demonstrated just how hard these challenges are. Examples include the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, the bombings in  Madrid and London, the threat of avian bird flu and SARS, the Beslan drama, the Boxing Day tsunami in South East Asia, and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the US. The 2005 terror attack in the London underground and the 2006’s Hurricane Katrina proved that precious time was lost because of de-synchronization of information and lack of up-to-date information sharing, between different public authorities.

One of the constant challenges encountered by public authorities when managing emergency response networks is the lack of actionable information, i.e. the information that is required for making high-quality decisions under pressure. During the initial phases of an emerging crisis it is often unclear what the situation is: what is the cause? How are people responding? How many casualties? What is the damage? Has the threat evaporated or is it still evolving?

Without accurate information, crisis managers find it hard to make fast and correct decisions. In fact, the absence of reliable information (combined with the flood of unsubstantiated reports and rumors) tends to have a paralyzing effect on decision-makers in a crisis situation. The risk in making decisions based on partial, non verified information may have unintended effects, which may fuel rather than dampen the crisis and may thus delay decision-makers from taking necessary steps.

The problem has both technical and cognitive roots:

• The technical problem lies in the inability of contemporary communication systems to provide information from multiple disaster sites to one crisis command center. Existing systems typically collapse during disasters, or only provide partial perspectives/solutions, for example: Usually command and control systems for police do not have information about hypsography – it is not necessary to store this kind of information for routine event management. However, in case of a flood police typically do not have enough information about the water coverage, since the system does not allow predictions regarding where the flood will expand to, etc. This information should ideally be obtained from other systems such as fire brigade systems and environment geographic information systems. To solve such problems, ESS will enable the merging of data from different data sources.
• The cognitive problem is connected to the inability of humans to scan, combine and analyze large amounts of data under threat and stress conditions.

ESS aims to significantly change this situation.

The ESS consortium will join forces to develop a revolutionary crisis communication system that will reliably transmit filtered and pre-organized information streams to the crisis command system, which will provide the relevant information that is actually needed to make critical decisions.

The information streams in ESS will be organized in such a way that they can be easily enhanced by and combined with other available applications and databases (thus enabling the coupling of the ESS system with crisis decision support systems currently under development). The ESS will provide an open API in order to allow any public authority, if needed, to add more applications customized to its particular needs. ESS data, functionalities and data flow will be based on ISO standards or industrial standards. Each commercial application which adopted or will adopt these standards will be able to connect to ESS.

Any Abnormal event may register as a sudden change or cumulative changes in one or several mediums which it interacts with (Telecom, Air, Spatial, Acoustic, Visual and more). For example, in an explosion, the affected mediums include: acoustic (“boom” sound), Visual (sudden explosion), and Telecom (sudden increase in traffic).  Therefore, Effective control of such an abnormal event means: monitoring each medium independently in real-time, activating an alarm when sudden or cumulative changes in one or more mediums are detected, and when necessary contacting the affected population and providing mass evacuation capabilities. ESS will integrate all these means to one central system which will enable crisis managers to respond to these challenges.

In order to validate the system it will be tested in three different test fields: a fire in forested area, abnormal event in a crowded stadium and toxic waste dump accidents. Operating ESS under different scenarios is needed in order to test the system’s capabilities in different kinds of crises using a variety of collection tools.