SIREN: Safety & Incident Response for Building Emergency Networks

Description

Natural disasters such as floods, wildfires, and earthquakes place enormous pressure on emergency services and humanitarian organisations, requiring rapid coordination of personnel, vehicles, equipment, and information under highly dynamic and uncertain conditions.

Responders often face disrupted transport networks, fragmented situational awareness, communication challenges, and competing operational priorities, making timely and effective operational decision-making particularly challenging.

Advances in optimisation, data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) offer significant opportunities to enhance disaster preparedness, resource coordination, and emergency response. The SIREN (Safety & Incident Response for Building Emergency Networks) project addresses these challenges by developing an integrated digital ecosystem that combines AI, GIS, advanced decision-support, resource mapping, resilient communication technologies, and operational coordination tools to support disaster management and humanitarian aid logistics.

Through collaboration between academic and industry partners, SIREN aims to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, fairness, and resilience of disaster response across fire, flood, and earthquake scenarios.

Research overview

The University of Leeds is leading the design and development of novel optimisation algorithms and decision-support models that support complex disaster response operations.

The research focuses on activities including debris operations management, relief aid distribution, wildfire suppression, search and rescue, casualty transportation, infrastructure restoration, and emergency resource allocation.

Working closely with emergency planners, first responders, humanitarian organisations, and technology partners, the project adopts a co-creation approach to ensure that the developed methods address real operational challenges.

The resulting optimisation models are validated using realistic disaster scenarios and integrated with operational disaster management platforms, enabling emergency responders to transform analytical insights into practical response plans and supporting more efficient, effective, fair, and resilient disaster management.

Key findings

The project is currently underway, and research findings will be published as they become available. Initial activities have focused on requirements elicitation and co-creation with emergency planners, humanitarian organisations, technology partners, and first responders to ensure that the developed optimisation and decision-support methods address real operational challenges.

An important early milestone was the SIREN RouteMAIT Co-Creation Workshop, delivered in a hybrid format at the University of Leeds, which brought together representatives from Local Resilience Forums, AFAD (Türkiye's Disaster and Emergency Management Authority), Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the National Fire Chiefs Council, emergency planning and crisis management specialists, technology partners, and academic researchers.

The workshop generated valuable insights into multi-agency coordination, disaster response operations, humanitarian logistics, operational decision-making, and system requirements, helping to refine the project's research priorities and the design of its optimisation models and decision-support tools.

Early work has also established the project's research framework and identified key disaster response use cases, including debris operations management, relief aid distribution, wildfire suppression, casualty transportation, and infrastructure restoration.

Impact

The SIREN project will contribute to more efficient, effective, fair, and resilient disaster response by developing advanced optimisation and decision-support capabilities for complex multi-agency operations.

Through close collaboration with emergency services, humanitarian organisations, industry partners, and government stakeholders, the project aims to translate cutting-edge research into practical technologies that enhance operational planning, resource allocation, and coordination across a range of disaster response activities.

The project's outcomes are expected to strengthen disaster management capabilities, support the adoption of next-generation emergency response technologies, and improve the ability of communities and organisations to prepare for, respond to, and recover from natural hazards.

Publications and outputs

• Emergency planning co-creation workshop, 27 February 2026

Contact

Professor Antonino Sgalambro and Dr Davood Shiri

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This project is funded by Innovate UK (under the Eureka ITEA4 programme) – 23033 – SIREN – ITEA4 2023 Competition.