An innovative approach to emergency management in large infrastructures

Critical Infrastructures as complex technical systems need sophisticated control systems enabling them to be managed effectively under normal, exceptional, and emergency conditions. The EU FP7 project EMILI was launched to develop innovative information technologies for emergency management in large complex Critical Infrastructures. CI are described as cyber-physical systems where physical behaviour and control are tightly integrated. Innovative information technologies as complex event processing and rule based reactions integrated with semantic modelling and physical simulation enable us to describe such cyber-physical systems with their behaviour and control adequately. These techniques provide a new problem oriented layer of description for situation assessment and reactions. They allows us to focus on the "what" of information processing leaving the "how" to an efficient information processing machinery. A comprehensive methodology of emergency modelling based on semantic models allows us to structure the many different kinds of information relevant in CI control. A Simulation and Training Environment SITE was designed which enables us to demonstrate our approach in three realistic but quite different CI use cases: an airport, a metro system, and a power grid.