In recent years the threat of terrorism in urban environments has become an important issue, emphasized by several successfully carried out terrorist attacks (New York, Madrid, London). More recent experiences reported in the global media have served to keep the perception of a terrorist threat alive, such as the failed attempt by the ‘underwear bomber’ Umar Farouk.
Most terrorist attacks or attempts within Europe have occurred at airports or other variations of public transport. Outside of Europe terrorists do not only attack public transport, but also focus on other types of locations.
When security forces are alerted to a specific terrorist threat, their main goal is to prevent or mitigate an actual attack. This process is called threat management and is supported by two sub processes: threat decomposition and capabilities management.
TACTICS introduces three roles: the Threat Manager (TM), the Threat Decomposition Manager (TDM) and the Capabilities Manager (CM). They work as a team to prevent or mitigate terrorist attacks. TACTICS aims to develop trustful and effective strategies in order to support each of these managers in responding more quickly and in a more structured, efficient way to a specific threat as well as minimizing the occurrence of false positives and negatives.
