Crimson (www.crimson.eu) is CS Group’s flagship Digital Twin and Data Centric C2/C4I product, developed with and for security stakeholders, critical infrastructure operators, as well as both public and private civil protection, security and defense organizations.
As confirmed by the European Commission's ‘Security Innovation Award 2025’ which Crimson received, we firmly believe that this solution represents one of the most remarkable success stories showcasing the benefits of the European Commission’s framework programs. It exemplifies the effective use of public funds for European research, with a significant impact on the protection, defense, and resilience of the European Union.
Crimson is a ground-breaking European sovereign solution empowering today thousands of European users to monitor and secure public spaces, natural environments, and critical infrastructures against a wide range of natural and man-made threats. By providing cutting-edge capabilities for situational awareness as well as operational and resilience management, Crimson supports a wide range of use cases ranging from routine security tasks to high-stakes, cross-border, and multi-agency crisis management operations across diverse domains.
Leveraging cutting-edge technologies like Digital Twin Earth, Hybrid Artificial Intelligence, Cobots, and UxVs, along with advanced Man-Machine Interaction techniques such as eXtended Reality, Crimson offers unparalleled capacities for monitoring and managing intricate sites while orchestrating operations across diverse domains.
Whether it is securing public areas and natural regions or coordinating search and rescue missions that require collaboration among multiple organizations in challenging, high-risk environments, including confined underground infrastructures, Crimson redefines situational awareness and operational efficiency. It serves the security and resilience needs of the European Union, its citizens, critical infrastructures, and natural environments.
Crimson offers groundbreaking capabilities that are revolutionizing security, resilience, and crisis management. It stands out as an end-to-end Digital Twin-based solution for vulnerability and risk assessment, scenario analysis, operation planning and management, collaborative training, and post-incident analysis. Its comprehensive platform supports remote collaboration among experts from various domains, including physical security, cybersecurity, civil protection, and defence.
In particular, Crimson addresses the following objectives:
Equipping responders with the most advanced and comprehensible situational awareness and decision support tool. Crimson enables the visualisation of a full Digital Twin of the environment through VR/AR/MR devices, as well as desktop and mobile platforms. Its fine-grained access control ensures that users see only the information relevant to their role and accessible to their profile, thus preventing cognitive overload and safeguarding confidentiality.
Acting as a central interoperable platform, Crimson provides holistic situational awareness and advanced operation management capabilities to command chains. It gathers and orchestrates various sensors and systems (e.g. robots and UAVs for multifaceted operations, AI systems for decision support, legacy systems) using its interoperability capabilities. As a C4I system, Crimson centralizes and fuses data through extensive interoperability capabilities and provides hybrid AI tools to analyse and interpret information and support decision making.
Enhancing responder safety: Crimson equips all personnel, from ground level to command centres, with suitable front-end systems enabling the detection of incident and the management of operations. This enables the efficient circulation of information across the involved organisations and services, sharpens responders' awareness of hazards and threats in their environment, and significantly reduces the cognitive burden on CC operators.
The platform enables enhanced situational awareness to be shared across multiple users, services, and organizations, both in command centres and in the field, through a Digital Twin-based interface. It presents a 2D/3D/4D common operational picture, from global to local scales, including infrastructure interiors and underground environments. The system features real-time fusion of multi-source geospatial and sensor data, intuitive user interfaces, and mixed reality capabilities to support first responders.
Crimson’s high interoperability allows for interconnection and joint operations management supporting the interconnection with sensors, UxVs, C2s, counter-UAS systems, as well as a wide range of legacy systems that Crimson can orchestrate. The platform integrates hybrid AI for decision support and automation, assisting users in reducing mental load and making effective decisions under pressure. It includes simulation capacities for forecasting and scenario analysis, as well as automation features like drone tasking for situation verification.
The system’s collaborative working capability is scalable and supports daily hundreds of users exchanging massive data to ensure secure and efficient operations. Designed with advanced Data Centric Architecture, Crimson manages access rights at the data level, ensuring data security and interoperability.
Crimson addresses several capability gaps identified by IFAFRI and by the DIREKTION project.
CG1 (“Real-time tracking of responders”) and “Geotracking of responders, risk mapping and life detection”: its Digital Twin-centric interface coupled with its mobile application allows command centres from multiple organisations to track operators and field units including within indoor and underground environments, and to communicate with them as demonstrated in the INTREPID H2020 project.
CG2 (“Real-time detection, monitoring and analysis of threats and hazards”), CG3 (“Rapid identification”), CG4 (“Integration of information”), CG6 (“Remote acquisition of information”), CG9 (“Actionable intelligence”), “Big picture view with checked data” and “Real-time information from and for on-scene responders”: wide integration of sensors and data fusion capabilities allow the Crimson user to have the complete situation at a glance. In addition, the hybrid AI component analyses incoming data, detects elements of interest, threats and hazard, and emits alerts accordingly.
CG7 (“Remote operations”): as demonstrated in the INTREPID project, Crimson is also capable of commanding and orchestrating operations involving human first responders multiple as well as UAVs and UGVs, thus enhancing the collaboration between unmanned systems. “Coordination between several agencies”, “Information sharing between multiple actors”: Crimson has built-in collaborative capabilities enabling the remote cooperation of several agencies and first responders with fine-grained data sharing and access right management.
“Adaptation to scenario changing”: the real-time data gathering and fusion, the 360° situation awareness, the ability to share information through multiple team and agencies, the ability to automatically raise alerts and the orchestration of the whole system using a no-code scenario authoring tool makes the solution fit to very quickly detect, decide and act on any change of situation.
The Crimson adventure began modestly with a team of two, eventually growing into a profitable business employing over 50 engineers and researchers. This team includes world-class experts in computer graphics, simulation, human-machine interfaces, XR, cloud computing and artificial intelligence, thus illustrating the wide range of expertise needed to create such a product.
The Crimson adventure began modestly with a team of two, eventually growing into a profitable business employing over 50 engineers and researchers. This team includes world-class experts in computer graphics, simulation, human-machine interfaces, XR, cloud computing and artificial intelligence, thus illustrating the wide range of expertise needed to create such a product.