The CRIMSON project - simulating populations in massive urban environments

The United Nations recently reported [1] that the global proportion of urban population reached 49% in 2005 and that 60% of the global population is expected to live in cities by 2030. Urbanised areas are extremely vulnerable to all sorts of threats. Indeed, the combination of heavy population concentrations, critical infrastructures and built environments make it possible for environmental, industrial or man-made incidents to rapidly escalate into major disorders. Recent events have forcefully demonstrated that authorities at all levels of government turn out to be inadequately prepared for the intricacies and dilemmas of disasters in large urban environments. Therefore, innovative tools are needed to assist them in the studies, planning and inter-organizational preparation efforts, enabling to understand vulnerabilities and security issues, define and assess crisis management procedures, and train personnel. The CRIMSON research project [2] has been funded by the European Commission in the field of Security Research to address this challenging need by researching, implementing and validating an innovative framework combining the latest virtual reality and simulation technologies. For that purpose, several technological challenges have been tackled by an international team of researchers, industrials and users, and important advances have been made in the following fields.