JRC research activities support the EU policy framework (Union Strategy (2020), The Counter-Terrorism Agenda for the EU (2020) and the Action Plan to support the protection of public spaces (2017)) with a specific emphasis on the protection of public spaces against terrorist attacks. It also addresses aspects of Critical Infrastructure protection in line with the EU's Critical Entities Resilience Directive (CER).
Historically, our scientific core competence focuses on the assessment of rapid dynamic phenomena (fast transient dynamics), in particular explosions.
However, as the nature of the global and European terrorism threat is constantly evolving, with varying attack tactics, adapted protection measures based on underlying scientific research are needed.
Therefore, JRC research equally addresses subjects such as Hostile Vehicle Mitigation, Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Vulnerability & risk assessments, as well as terrorism and extremism-related data collection using Machine-Learning and Large Language Model approaches.