The United Nations “Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030” proposes a
shift of paradigm, emphasizing disaster risk management as opposed to disaster management.
This highlights the importance of new procedures, according to which the whole community
living in an area must be informed of and involved in the management of the risk of a disaster
and of its effects.
A make-or-break condition to enable this approach is to be aware of the crucial role of
information before, during, and after the emergency event. Exploiting information at best
depends on technical and human factors. On the technical side it requires a tight integration
between a flexible and efficient communication infrastructure and data processing instruments
that can collect and expose the information to the various stakeholders. On the human side it
requires full awareness of the available instruments and of their capabilities, not limited to the
public protection and disaster relief (PPDR) forces, but also to local stakeholders and private
citizens.
The core proposal of EDIT4MCC is the implementation of a Digital Twin (DT) of the Mission
Critical (MC) communication network that will be used to:
• Train the general public on the available MC services, to increase and extend awareness and
response capabilities beyond the PPDR forces;
• Experiment new services with the goal to augment the response capability as well as the
effectiveness of the communication;
• Study fault recovery and resilience by simulating the various fault scenarios that could occur
during the emergency and evaluate how it is possible to cope with them introducing new
network components and resources.
The basic motivation is that it is not possible to interfere with the normal operations of the
network and/or to allow the general public to experiment with it, for various reasons, most of all
because we do not know when an emergency may occur ad therefore the real infrastructure
must be always ready to operate.
The DT implementation will reproduce the functionality of MC communication services as well
as the possibility to connect and integrate real components from the ground. This will allow:
• to test the effectiveness of monitoring systems and their degree of integration with the whole
infrastructure;
• to design and experiment new services starting from the available data, allowing
crowdsourcing from the local community.
The DT proposed will be implemented in the cloud exploiting the NFV technology, and will
provide:
• Ease of description of the network architecture (thanks to the software descriptors foreseen by
the NFV MANO specification);
• High degree of reconfigurability (point and click activation of components and network
services is a standard feature of NFV MANO compliant platforms);
• Conformance with the real infrastructure thanks to the usage of virtual components that are
based on full functional software implementing the protocols and not on software simulators.