About

The main goal of the DIEM-SSP project (Disasters and Emergencies Management for Safety and Security in Industrial Plants) is to carry out research and developments activities to deal with the complexity resulting from emergency management in industrial plants and critical infrastructures.
An industrial plant is usually a Critical Infrastructure (CI), and the complexity of CIs exponentially increases when emergency occurs, both for safety or security issues. In this sense there are, among others, two critical aspects:

• medical issues intended as the need to have emergency procedures allowing medical staff to operate efficiently in stressing and complex environments.
• emergency management issues intended as capabilities to reduce human errors as much as possible (during emergency management) and properly route any patients with severe trauma to the proper First Aid Facility.

The DIEM-SSP project rises from a simultaneous consideration of the two above: efficient procedures are needed both on the emergency site and in hospitals; these procedures should be combined with a proper critical patients routing toward the most suitable First-Aid Facilities and with a reduction of human errors during the emergency management. Furthermore, new procedures or methodologies for emergency management must be carefully tested before used: the need to assess their validity before their application in a real emergency situation depends on the need to have a clear picture of the procedures effectiveness. Therefore, two interoperable simulators, based on the IEEE 1516 High Level Architecture (HLA) will be developed and used as test bed on specific case studies.
The DIEM-SSP project objectives are summarized as follows:

• definition of new emergency procedures to be used in hospitals for critical patients management (the patients with severe trauma coming from the emergency site);
• proper routing of critical patients from the emergency site to the most suitable First Aid Facilities through the optimal location of critical infrastructures (including hospitals) and logistic network design;
• reduction of the number of patients with severe trauma (and reduction of damages to critical infrastructures) by using emergency procedures which take into account the human factor/error,
• demonstration of the effectiveness of the actions cited above through an interoperable simulation based test-bed.