The project aims to revolutionize the way smart cities become more prepared for and resilient against physical and cyber-attacks on their soft targets, smart spaces and critical infrastructure. This is achieved through augmenting situation awareness in city spaces with greater intelligence, machine-encoded context knowledge, and real-time evaluation of cyber and physical security threat levels.

The S4AllCities approach centers around three modular yet interconnected digital twin sub-systems designed to ingest large amounts of data from edge-computing sensors (such as a portable near-infrared spectrometer for detection of chemical precursors to explosives, or fiber Bragg-grating based sensors for real time monitoring of city infrastructure) deployed around the Smart Cities and which appropriately fuse the information received to establish recommended courses of action and present timely, concise, actionable information to the relevant operators.

The S4AllCities System of Systems (SoS) functionality is achieved by means of a large array of AI-based tools operating on the massive amounts of data received from the sensor networks. These networks comprise multiple innovative sensors further advanced through the project activities and complemented by smart city legacy sensor networks. The S4AllCities SoS is completed by both physical- and cyber-security shielding using appropriate safety and anonymization standard methods.

The S4AllCities SoS will be validated in three European Smart Cities: Trikala (GR), Bilbao (ES) and Pilsen (CZ), where the system will be installed on a pilot/demonstration basis and run continuously for three months using different scenarios involving physical and cyber-attacks on the smart cities’ soft targets.