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

Abstract

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, national and international scale among affected disaster risk management and response stakeholders. Today, the collective interoperability is not sufficiently achieved during disaster events, which reduces the ability to effectively undertake planning and response actions that require collaborative working among all the stakeholders involved. To address this shortcoming, the project develops a platform that offers a wide range of tools, products and services to support decision-making processes, and in particular different activities in the response planning process for complex multi-hazard crisis situations. The platform is designed in a modular approach, using various data sources as inputs and proposing a set of services that assist command and control centres, first responders and local populations in taking risk-informed decisions during the preparedness and response phases of disaster management. Some of the core functionalities are built around the ability to integrate space-based, ground-based and aerial-based data in order to forecast and monitor floods and other disaster events, and to feed the system with operational and external data sources to provide major inputs to emergency coordination