evaGuide is a Security Management Platform for enhanced situation awareness and real-time adaptive evacuation strategies for large venues for sports and entertainment. evaGuide aims to address the needs of the safety of large facility visitors during complex evacuation processes, following normal and abnormal events (crises) towards the creation of an easily deployable system that will be able to timely identify new threats, designate and sustain a Location based Dynamic Evacuation Route (LDER) that improves all corresponding response times under any circumstances. Moreover it will support the complete lifecycle of evacuation planning, simulating complex scenarios, training of safety personnel and assessment of the performed actions. The results of the market research that has been performed among the 300 member stadia of ESSMA (the European Stadium & Safety Management Association) revealed that there is a clear need for a project like evaGuide that addresses all the phases of the evacuation lifecycle and offers superior situational awareness, while at the same time existing and emerging regulations from FIFA/UEFA need to be met. The business sustainability/exploitation potential has been validated in the Feasibility Study, which is an integral part of this proposal. The project outcome will be a fully functional evaGuide platform demonstrator delivered for operational use to one stadium (one of the ESSMA member stadia, selected on M2). The demonstrator will perform according to the adapted requirements defined by ESSMA and the stakeholders involved (finalized on M10), will be fully integrated (by M20) and tested (M21), ready to be commercially exploited by the joint commercialization entity defined during the last months of the project (M24).

Smart cities have frontline responsibility to ensure a secure and safe physical and digital ecosystem promoting cohesive and sustainable urban development for the well being of EU citizens. S4AllCities integrates advanced technological and organizational solutions in a market oriented unified Cyber – Physical Security Management framework, aiming at raising the resilience of cities’ infrastructures, services, ICT systems, IoT and fostering intelligence and information sharing among city’s security stakeholders. Three pilot cases, with the engagement of a total of 5 cities in 4 countries (Spain, Romania, Czech Republic, Greece), enable S4ALLCITIES System of Systems to deploy and validate its intelligent components and functionalities on actual environment, ensuring the delivery of solutions and services in line with smart cities emerging requirements, focused on: risk-based open smart spaces security management; cyber security shielding; suspicious activity and behaviour tracking; identification of unattended objects; real-time estimation of cyber-physical risks in multiple locations and measures activation for effective crisis management. S4ALLCities smart components, integrated within 3 Digital Twin Systems, will demonstrate their technological advances in tackling terrorist attacks with high risk for mass casualties, within the complex environment of open crowded spaces. The multidisciplinary consortium (9 EU countries) will exploit project’s innovative technological systems in the global market providing a cost efficient and market ready integrated solution. S4ALLCities exploitation phase will promote good practices and guidance material across EU cities so as to enhance capacity building of involved stakeholders, reduce the vulnerabilities of public spaces, mitigate the consequences of adversary attacks, raise public awareness and strike a balance between improving security and preserving the open nature of public spaces as well as citizens’ sense of freedom.

LETS–CROWD will overcome challenges preventing the effective implementation of the European Security Model (ESM) with regards to mass gatherings. This will be achieved by providing the following to security policy practitioners and in particular, LEAs: (1) A dynamic risk assessment methodology for the protection of crowds during mass gatherings centred on human factors in order to effectively produce policies and deploy adequate solutions. (2) A policy making toolkit for the long-term and strategic decision making of security policy makers, including a database of empirical data, statistics and an analytical tool for security policies modelling, and (3) A set of human centred tools for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), including real time crowd behaviour forecasting, innovative communication procedures, semantic intelligence applied to social networks and the internet, and novel computer vision techniques. LETS-CROWD will be a security practitioner driven project, fostering the communication and cooperation among LEAs, first responders, civil protection and citizens in the fight against crime and terrorism during mass gatherings by a set of cooperation actions. The project will put citizens at the centre of the research and will assess and evaluate how security measures affect them, and how they perceive them, while respecting EU fundamental rights. LETS-CROWD impact will be measured under practical demonstrations involving seven LEAs and relevant emergency services units. In order to facilitate the assessment of the performance, transferability, scalability and large scale deployment of these solutions, the demonstrations will be conducted following eleven use cases.

CrowdDNA is a radically new concept to assist public space operators in the management of crowds, i.e., mass event organization, heavy pedestrian traffic management, crowd movement analysis and decision support. CrowdDNA technology is based on a new generation of crowd simulation models, which are capable of predicting the dynamics, behaviour and risk factors of crowds of extreme density. The main idea behind CrowdDNA is that analysis of some specific macroscopic features of a crowd, such as its apparent motion (that can be easily measured in real mass events) can reveal a valuable information about the internal structure and provide a precise estimate of a crowd state. This challenges the existing paradigms in the field that rely on simulation technologies and require measuring the simulation variables to initialize it, such as density, counts or individual features which are each difficult to estimate. This vision raises one main scientific challenge, which can be summarized as the need for a deep understanding of the relations between the smallest scales of crowd behaviours (e.g., contact and pushes at the limb scale) and the largest ones up to the entire crowd. CrowdDNA is a first attempt to combine biomechanical and behavioural simulation in complex scenarios of interactions between many humans. It will revolutionize the practices of crowd management to answer the requirements of modern society on safety and comfort at mass events or in crowded transportation facilities. CrowdDNA builds the foundations of new research on crowds, and opens up new opportunities for studies on physical interaction across cognitive sciences and biomechanics, as well as robotics and autonomous vehicles for safe navigation among people.