The ENTRAP project is the first project that has collected and summarised information on previous EU funded research for enhancing the security of explosives. It is also the first project that aimed at assessing emerging counter-tools using OR methods with respect to their effectiveness in relevant scenarios including cost, ethical and legal perspectives.
For doing the assessments, new OR methods have been developed and existing methods adapted to enable qualitative assessments. ENTRAP made a large inventory of previous research projects and inserted relevant data in a tailor made database, to enable the assessments. To some extent, the inventory had limitations due to the difficulty in access to specific information.
The terrorist’s activities have been analysed, resulting in a detailed terrorist timeline. The close connection between terrorist key activities and society’s capabilities to counter them have given new insights to the needs for capability development.
ENTRAP is providing decision-makers, practitioners and scientists with accurate information on counter-tools requirements and emerging capabilities. The project helps governmental bodies to make threat assessments and to provide accurate guidelines for counter-terrorism practitioners. The development of new tools and methods is the foundation on which a step-change can be made when it comes to preventing and fighting crime and terrorism. The project has identified areas where a step-change is required.
ENTRAP has performed a gap analysis were gaps have been clustered. Gap bridging assessments on critical gaps that describes a way to overcome the gaps have been made.
All work in ENTRAP has led to the formulation of the ENTRAP vision of future capabilities to counter terrorism by explosives. ENTRAP has identified challenges that need to be overcome in order to achieve the visions as well as the recommended research required to do so.
A successful future research on the recommended topics will increase the probability for the society to have access to novel counter-tools that give practitioners significantly better capabilities to effectively counter terrorism in their daily work. The society will consequently be much more resilient to terrorism by explosives. To protect society it is not sufficient to improve individual capabilities. Societal resilience is strengthened by using a broad set of capabilities across all capability domains. A wide range of societal actors such as for example policy-makers, social workers (to counter radicalisation) and city planners (to mitigate consequences) as a whole need to develop a larger awareness on how increased resilience can be obtained in the future.
