HEIMDALL: a technological solution for floods and multi-hazard management support

Managing floods and other disasters usually involves multiple emergency management organisations, even jurisdictions and countries for cross-border events. Cascading effects can amplify the degree and complexity of disaster situations. This imposes a high need and degree of inter-organisational communication and cooperation during response and preparedness phases between stakeholders. However, studies have revealed that collective interoperability is not sufficiently achieved, which reduces the ability to perform collaborative activities. The Horizon 2020-funded project HEIMDALL (Multi-Hazard Cooperative Management Tool for Data Exchange, Response Planning and Scenario Building) aims to improve immediate and long-term collaborative strategic planning on a regional scale among the affected disaster risk management and response stakeholders. The objective is to provide decision makers and other stakeholders a platform offering a wide range of tools to support emergency management, in particular different activities in the response planning process for complex multi-hazard crisis situations realised through scenarios. The platform can support flood response by modelling and forecasting the hazard impact, also providing inputs on potential cascading effects. HEIMDALL is the fruit of a variety of technological specialists and end-users collaborating which addresses as best as possible the requirements of the diverse actors involved in disaster risk management. The system is designed in a modular approach, using various data sources as inputs and proposing a set of services that can be useful for control centres, first responders and local populations during preparedness and response. The platform integrates space-based, ground-based and aerial-based data in order to forecast and monitor disaster events. It also includes operational and external data sources to provide major inputs to emergency coordination. The Scenario Management service supports decision makers in building, storing, reviewing and comparing realistic and multidisciplinary scenarios and in tracking decisions, measures taken and lessons learnt. Modelling and Simulation forecast the hazard behaviour based on the existing input data. The Risk and Vulnerability service delivers specific products based on Earth Observation and simulations, assessing the physical and human exposure and impacts. Situation Assessment integrates all relevant information sources to provide a sound and clear composite picture of the evolving situation. Decision Support generates the information base for decisions related to response-oriented tasks such as contingency management. These functionalities provide the possibility for the end users to perform an analysis of many possible scenarios and to adapt their response strategies accordingly, bearing in mind potential future situations. The system is demonstrated on flood events in Italy and Scotland