Stepwise : Logo – Brochure
The STEPWISE project arises in the context of the terrorist attacks in Europe and the EU plan released in October 2017 on the protection of public spaces. The first idea was to help member states to have better protection in public spaces, to reduce vulnerabilities and to prevent future attacks, especially on sensitive sites.
Completed since the first November 2018, the contract with the partners will end on October 30, 2020, two years of conception with internal police security services.
The name of STEPWISE project is for: Simulation, Training and Evaluation Platform for the Protection of Crowded Public Spaces (simulation, training and evaluation platform for the protection of crowded public spaces).
STEPWISE will contribute to the improvement of the protection of public spaces, events and other soft targets to three objectives:
– to enable the rapid creation of Virtual Reality mock-ups of real-world spaces
– to bring innovative security design without claiming the public space and bothering or frightening populations
– to assess the vulnerability of public spaces and jointly develop and evaluate strategies to improve both their security and resilience without having to descend upon each of them
8 actors are mobilized to produce this « turnkey » software. 3 Police forces: The French Ministry of the Interior, The Directorate of Special Units of the Belgian Federal Police, The Dutch Police. They also have 3 research and expertise centers: The Link University Campus in Rome, The Center for Security Research in Athens, The European Security Organization in Brussels. At the end, 2 private actors are on the project, Diginext and Crisisplan B.V
On October 15, the research center of the National Police College, as the project team presented the beta version of the STEPWISE platform to an audience composed of experts from the Ministry of the Interior and Europeans police officers.
The intensive use of public spaces and the ever-changing vulnerability of these spaces have fueled the security concerns of public authorities across Europe. They try to make these spaces safer while preserving accessibility.
Stepwise : Example of building modelisation
The STEPWISE platform aims to allow the rapid creation of virtual reality models of spaces and buildings. This allows for different threat scenarios to be predicted.