Project description

Project background

Emergency care falls within the remit of the public sector. Nevertheless, private companies have a large number of resources (including skills) at their disposal, which can be very helpful in providing emergency care to the suffering population in the event of a crisis. In the NOLAN project, the option of a public-private partnership in crisis management is being systematically researched for the first time. The project partners are – together with dialogue partners from the private and public sectors – investigating the possibilities for the effective and practical design of a "Public Private Emergency Collaboration" (PPEC). 

Project objectives

The aim of the project is to improve the supply security of an urban population with essential goods in crises. Concepts for an efficient cooperation of private actors of the commercial supply chains (in particular retail, logistics, KRITIS operators) with the state actors (in particular German “BOS”) will be developed. The project contributes to improving public crisis management in the event of supply chain failure.

For an escalating crisis event in urban areas, a holistic concept of emergency logistics will be developed that is scalable in escalation stages and focuses on the cooperation of private actors and state actors in emergency supply, taking into account the findings from humanitarian supply chains.

Based on economic, quantitative analyses, an emergency logistics concept for urban areas will be developed and its functionality simulated and validated using previously defined scenarios. The legal admissibility and feasibility of the measures will also be examined by a specialised project partner. Due to the geographical references of the network partners (in particular local networks and headquarters of the institutions) and associated partners, the project will focus on the urban centres of Berlin and Stuttgart. The focus is on the supply of vital, discrete goods such as food, medicines and bottled drinking water. Methodologically, a distinction can be made between two different approaches. On the one hand, the supply chains of public authorities and private companies are modelled and the interaction of the chains simulated and optimized. It is important that the extent of the disaster is defined in a flexible (scalable) way. At the same time, a game theoretical analysis of the cooperation is carried out, in which, among other things, fair approaches to the distribution of costs and risks or problems regarding cooperation incentives and information flows are scientifically worked out.

In the course of the entire project, great importance is attached to the involvement of interest groups. In stakeholder workshops, the interim results are therefore regularly presented, validated by the participants and the feedback generated is then processed in the project. Finally, the project partners will develop a common demonstrator, which will present the results of the cooperation along the different crisis escalation stages in the form of a user-friendly simulation tool.