30% of EU territory (consisting of 30 million inhabitants) encompasses numerous mountain ranges or chains, including the Alps, the Sierra Nevada, the Island of Crete, the Pyrenees, the Apennines, the Sierra da Estrela, the Massif Central,the upper Tatra, the Highlands, the Carpathians, etc. Mountain areas represent over 50% of the territory in Italy, Spain, Greece, Austria, Switzerland and Portugal. ASSIST dealt with with the characteristics of these mountain areas. The goal was to implement pre-operational services and realise advanced integrated safety and information services for the Alps. The advanced services shall be based on already operational crisis and information and crisis communication systems (pre-cursor services as e.g. ESIS). The overall objective of the proposed project was to specify, design, implement and validate a generic system architecture for the production and exchange of data products used for risk prevention and risk event management.

The project focusseds on risks typical to mountainous areas e.g. avalanches, landslides, debris flows, floods, etc. The backbone of the overall concept are so-called “Service Nodes”. These nodes are autonomously operated by organisations which are responsible for risk management. The Service Nodes are capable to:

• request and ingest raw input data (satellite-borne, air-borne and terrestrial)
• process the input data into products suitable for risk prevention and crisis management
• distribute the products within the “User Network” (fixed and mobile regional risk management centres and - in case of risk events - up to the mobile staffs in field)
• exchange products with other Service Nodes operated by different organisations (e.g. police, hospitals, ambulance services, air rescue, fire fighters, etc.)

These Service Nodes are laid out to support both   

• day-to-day monitoring and predictions of risk mitigation scenarios
• operation during concrete crisis situations with different requirements in terms of data products, data timeliness and distribution.

The project team is composed to reflect both scenarios. It consists of organisations with different scopes (avalanche prediction, mountain rescue, development of complex server infrastructures, generation of enhanced Earth Observation products, integration of mobile field equipment with positioning and communication capabilities, etc.) and nationalities with corresponding regulatory constraints (Austria, Germany, Italy, Switzerland). The initial validation of the system was performed within a small triangle between Austria, Italy and Switzerland.