PSI - Issue 78

Matjaž Dolšek et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 78 (2026) 1569 – 1576

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tested, it will provide insight into the performance of the EMS under the considered scenario, effectively supporting emergency preparedness. © 2025 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of XX ANIDIS Conference organizers

Keywords: Urban emergency planning; Seismic risk; Flood risk; Multi-risk; Cross-border; Strategic building performance; Road network.

1. Introduction Emergency preparedness in urban areas increasingly requires integrated analytical frameworks capable of supporting strategic and operational planning in multi-risk scenarios. While traditional risk assessments often focus on single hazards or rely on long-term average indicators such as Expected Annual Loss (EAL), emergency planning demands a more dynamic and scenario-based approach that integrates realistic consequence assessment data within operational emergency planning. This is particularly true in cross-border contexts, where effective preparedness must rely on harmonized methodologies capable of accounting for heterogeneous methodological, legal, institutional, and infrastructural systems. This paper presents the ongoing research conducted within the BORIS2 (Cross Border Risk assessment for increased prevention and preparedness in Europe: way forward) project with the aim of providing a methodology to integrate single and multi-risk assessment and loss estimation with consistent scenario selection and Emergency Management System (EMS) performance evaluation to support decision-makers during the emergency planning phase. An extensive literature review on the topic was conducted and documented (BORIS2, 2025b) to identify existing tools to evaluate EMS units and connect them to risk metrics, decision valiable and performance indicators. The BORIS2 project builds on the foundation of the former BORIS project, which provided a time-based multi risk assessment framework at the municipal scale, emphasizing harmonized data models and conventional metrics such as EAL (Polese et al. 2024 , Babič et al., 2025 ). A key evolution of BORIS2 lies in the shift of objectives. The objective in BORIS project was to provide information to support strategic decisions towards risk reduction measures, while in the case of BORIS2 the goal is to enhance emergency preparedness and disaster prevention strategies. This objective was realized within the BORIS2 framework (BORIS2, 2025a), which consists of four steps. This shift reflects the practical need to provide actionable information for preparedness planning based on loss estimation and response of critical structures. One of the goals of the project is to define comprehensive strategies to enhance urban resilience to natural disasters such as earthquakes and fluvial floods by assessing the operational capacity for urban emergency systems to remain functional in the immediate aftermath of the considered catastrophic event in line with the Limit Condition for Emergency (Bramerini and Castenetto, 2016) proposed by the Italian Civil Protection Department (ICPD) and the related I.OPà.CLE method (Dolce et al., 2018). While the ELC and I.OPà.CLE framework provides a structured approach for identifying critical emergency elements, it typically relies on a selection of these components without explicitly considering the direct relationship between the intensity of the hazard, the vulnerability of exposed elements of the specific area under assessment and the estimated impacts on the population and other assets at risk. The BORIS2 framework is summarized in Section 2, with each step explained in a more detail in Section 3. Section 4 briefly presents the applications planned to be carried out within BORIS2 project. Finally, the conclusions, including the limitations of the framework, are presented in Section 5. 2. Overview of the proposed framework The BORIS2 methodology is a multi-step framework developed to simulate earthquake, flood, and compound hazard scenarios, estimate losses in residential buildings and critical structures for emergency response (EMS units), such as hospitals, shelters, fire stations, and coordination centers, and assess the performance of the Emergency Response System (ERS) at the municipal level. It supports comprehensive consequence assessment, not only for frequent but also for rare events with long return periods, providing a robust basis for cross-border risk evaluation and EMS performance assessment.