SAFE-FESTIVALS

SAFE-FESTIVALS aims to improve security in public spaces during festivals and concerts. The project uses a collaborative and immersive training approach based on a serious gaming simulation platform to enable security actors, organizers, and municipalities to develop security strategies. The simulation platform will support event planning, enable environment creation, and simulate threat scenarios with different roles and in different conditions. The project’s key scope is to improve the safety and security of festivals and crowded events in (semi-) public spaces by providing better training for security actors, increasing awareness among local stakeholders, reducing costs and improving replicability, emphasizing incremental risk analysis, and promoting continuous learning and improvements.

First glimpse of what the serious gaming platform interface is going to look like

Since recent developments, safety and security of festivals is not any longer a need, but has rapidly become a must, SAFE–FESTIVALS develops AI- and data-driven tools for security stakeholders to improve safety and security through immersive serious games.

In this first half of the project, the SAFE-FESTIVALS project team has worked closely with end-users and security stakeholders to collect their needs and expectations and derive the requirements for the SAFE-FESTIVALS platform, and deliver a baseline architecture, also thanks to the support of the CNTRL festival security company. The results of all this work results in the description of requirements and baseline architecture within deliverable D1 SAFE-FESTIVALS.

Then we worked on integrating the D-GEM tool with the Crowd Simulator, while developing new functionalities to simulate threat scenarios at large festivals, in an Agile approach. Therefore, we worked with the festival organizers first to commonly define a demonstration plan and then to set up the virtual environment and demonstrate the threat scenarios in a multi-player serious gaming immersive environment at the Paaspop festival.

A post-festival evaluation was finally conducted to measure the effectiveness of the platform. Next to development and experiments in the context of the Paaspop festival, with dissemination at other festivals, we discussed potential business models to exploit the SAFE-FESTIVALS results.