PSCE either is directly involved as a partner or contributes indirectly to various EU projects, which aim to influence the development of more effective communication systems for public safety.
Ongoing projects
BroadWay - Innovation activity to develop technologies to enable a pan-European interoperable broadband mobile system for PPDR, validated by sustainable testing facilities The BroadWay project will take the first procurement steps to enable ‘interoperable next generation of broadband radio communication systems for public safety and security’ to improve Public Safety and Disaster relief organisation’s (PPDR’s) service to Europe’s citizens, and enhance interoperability across borders. A total of 60 additional organisations have expressed their support for the BroadWay project. The BroadWay team, plus this additional support, covers a total of 23 European Countries with 7 additional countries represented by their ministries responsible for public safety communication. To learn more about BroadWay visit the project’s website: https://www.broadway-info.eu/ BroadWay
The primary goal of this project is to: ‘Procure Innovation activity to develop and demonstrate TRL8 technologies that will enable a pan-European interoperable broadband mobile system for PPDR, validated by sustainable testing facilities’
This project implements a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) with the purpose to realise innovative solutions for the implementation of the ‘SpiceNet Reference’ architecture as defined by the BroadMap project.
A pan-European pilot system will be developed within the timeframe 2021, validated by sustainable test capabilities, and to the satisfaction of a European wide team of public safety practitioners.
The BroadWay partnership is comprised of 11 buyers in 11 countries, who represent the organisations with responsibility for transition to broadband for Public Safety Communication within their country. All buyer partners are from EU member states. 4 are the direct responsible Ministry within their country, and 7 are the delegated authority in their country, responsible to operate public safety communication networks. Our buyers represent the operation of public safety communication for 1.4Million public safety practitioners in their respective countries.
49 practitioner organisations from a total of 19 countries have offered to take part in the pilot validation/evaluation activities as members of our Practitioner team.
The S&R project will design, implement and test through a series of large scale pilot scenarios a highly interoperable, modular open architecture platform for first responders’ capitalising on expertise and technological infrastructure from both COncORDE and IMPRESS FP7 projects. The governance model of S&R will be designed to operate more effectively and its architectural structure will allow to easily incorporate next generation R&D and COTS solutions which will be possibly adopted in the future disaster management systems. The Model will also support a unified vision of the EU role and will provide a common framework to assess needs and integrate responses. The framework will enable supportive approach using a wider range of decisional support features and monitoring systems and will also give to first responders an effective and unified vision of (a) the dynamic changes going on during event’s lifetime and (b) the capabilities and resources currently deployed in the field.Search & Rescue
The RESPOND-A project aims at developing holistic and easy-to-use solutions for First Responders by bringing together the complementary strengths of its Investigators in 5G wireless communications, Augmented and Virtual Reality, autonomous robot and unmanned aerial vehicle coordination, intelligent wearable sensors and smart monitoring, geovisual analytics and immersive geospatial data analysis, passive and active localization and tracking, and interactive multi-view 360o video streaming. The synergy of such cutting-edge technological advancements is likely to provide high-end and continuous flows of data, voice and video information to First Responders and their Command & Control Centers for predicting and assessing the various incidents readily and reliably, and saving lives more efficiently and effectively, while maximising the safeguarding of themselves, before, during and after disasters. To this end, RESPOND-A envisions at exercising First Responders for getting familiar with the project technological outcomes, and demonstrating their real-world performance and effectiveness in the classified training facilities of our Responder Partners under hydrometeorological, geophysical and technological disaster scenarios.Respond-a
Past projects
CiProVoT - Civil Protection Volunteers Training CiProVoT is an Erasmus+ project which aims to develop a Trans-national training course module for Civil Protection Volunteers (partly peer-education/partly with the use of external expert trainers). By developing training seminars for Trainers of CP Volunteers, the project will motivate them to obtain new training guidelines for CP volunteerism. With this purpose, CiProVoT’s Trans-national training course module will include a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) for Civil Protection volunteers, as well as students and graduates from Civil Protection, Engineering, Geology and Architecture courses interested in the field of natural disaster prevention and management. The project started in January 2018 for a duration of two years. As a partner in CiProVoT, PSCE will be involved with dissemination and communication activities. To learn more about CiProVoT visit the project’s website: https://ciprovot-project.eu The 4 training modules for Crisis Management are now available. The Introductory Module Click here to access the modules! DRIVER + is the continuation of DRIVER, and seek to drive the next stage of innovation in Crisis Management for European Resilience, and take better into account the needs of Crisis Management practitioners. DRIVER + will deliver a pan-European Test-Bed for Crisis Management capability development, a Portfolio of Solutions (PoS) and promote a shared understanding in Crisis Management across Europe. DRIVER and DRIVER+ starts from the experience that neither successful R&D nor strong end-user demand always lead to innovation in the Crisis Management (CM) domain. This is a problem since as societies become more complex increasing scope and unpredictability of potential crises and faster dynamics of major incidents put increasingly stringent demands on CM. European CM capabilities already constitute a mature System of Systems; hence wholesale redesign would often be too costly and might critically destabilise existing CM capabilities. To achieve its overarching objective, DRIVER+ is committed to deliver and make sustainable by April 2020 (end date of the project): PSCE will be mainly in charge of DRIVER+ Standardisation and Dissemination & Communication activities. Standard presentation of the project can be found here. → Visit DRIVER: http://driver-project.eu/ E2mC (Evolution of Emergency Copernicus services) project aims at demonstrating the technical and operational feasibility of the integration of social media analysis and crowd-sourced information within both the Mapping and Early Warning Components of Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS). The Project will develop a prototype of a new EMS Service Component (Copernicus Witness), designed to exploit social media analysis and crowdsourcing capabilities to generate a new Product of the EMS Portfolio. The purpose of the new Copernicus Witness Service Component is to improve the timeliness and accuracy of geo-spatial information provided to Civil Protection authorities, on a 24/7 basis, during the overall crisis management cycle and, particularly, in the first hours immediately after the event. This will result in an early confirmation of alerts from running Early Warning Systems as well as first rapid impact assessment from the field. The technological enabler of the Copernicus Witness is the innovative and scalable Social&Crowd (S&C) Platform, developed by E2mC.
Heterogeneous social media data streams (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and different data: text, image, video, ) will be analysed and sparse crowdsourcing communities will be federated (crisis specific as Tomnod, HOT, SBTF and generic as Crowdcrafting, EpiCollect.). → Visit E2mC: e2mc-project.eu The CRISMA project focused on large-scale crisis scenarios with immediate human, societal and economic consequences often irreversible. It developed a CRISMA System to model crisis management scenarios, improve action and preparedness. The software developed by the CRISMA Consortium can help decision makers and crisis managers to model possible crisis scenarios, assess the consequences of an incident and optimise the deployment of resources necessary to resolve the crisis. The project ran from March 2012 to August 2015. Throughout the course of the project, PSCE was in charge of dissemination activities and the organisation of various project events and workshops to present the project’s results. → Visit CRISMA: http://www.crismaproject.eu/ The BROADMAP project will take the first steps towards future procurement of ‘interoperable next generation of broadband radio communication systems for public safety and security’ (DRS-18) to improve PPDR’s service to Europe’s citizens and enhance interoperability across borders. The primary goal of this project is to: Collect and validate the PPDR (Public Protection and Disaster Relief) organisations’ existing requirements with the aim to establish a core set of specifications, and roadmap for procurement, to achieve future evolution of EU broadband applications and interoperable radio communication solutions This project implements a Coordination and Support Action (CSA) with the purpose to inform and guide the future procurement of research and development, networks and devices and their deployment to realise new interoperable broadband networks, and the ecosystems of applications and services to support the PPDR and critical communications community. The outcomes of BROADMAP will likely feed into later Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) actions, and/or Public Procurement of Innovative Solutions (PPI), which may be subject of subsequent projects funded by EC. Project BROADMAP addresses the following goals which will likely define the PCP, or other subsequent procurement steps defined as appropriate: BROADMAP Press Release is available here. → BROADMAP: http://www.broadmap.eu/ Current emergency systems and 112 services are based on legacy telecommunication technologies, which cannot cope with IP-based services that European citizens use every day. Some of the related limitations are the partial media support, the lack of integration of social media, and the use of an analogue modem for providing eCall services with limited data amount. As most operators have started migrating towards broadband IP-based infrastructures, current emergency systems need also to be upgraded and adapted in order to fulfill regulatory requirements in terms of Next Generation emergency services. The main objective of EMYNOS project is the design and implementation of a Next Generation platform capable of accommodating rich-media emergency calls that combine voice, text, and video, thus constituting a powerful tool for coordinating communication among citizens, call centres and first responders. Additionally, EMYNOS addresses issues such as call routing/redirection to the closest-available call center, retrieval of the caller location, hoax calls prevention, support for people with disabilities, and integration of social media. PSCE is contributing to the definition of user requirements (WP2) and is leading dissemination activities (WP5). → Visit EMYNOS: http://www.emynos.eu/ In a disaster situation, three major elements contribute to a success: having the right resource available in the shortest time, with the highest relevance and at the right location. Access to necessary information, communication with other rescuers and stakeholders as well as the availability of resources are key factors in minimizing damage and loss of life. Large-scale disasters and crises situations increase the requirements on man and material exponentially. Additional challenges, in particular in cross border events, include language barriers, knowhow and organizational barriers and technical barriers (communication and data exchange). To address this challenge it is necessary to analyse three defining factors: This analysis will enable the definition of a concept for a common information space. A requirement for a successful pan-European information space is the definition of a common taxonomy. The common information space, which implies an EU wide standardization activity, will widen the EU wide market for organization developing solutions and tools for crisis management. Apart from dissemination activities, PSCE contributes to the inventory of events, disasters, data sets, tools, services, procedures and processes used by first responders and other stakeholders. → Visit EPISECC: https://www.episecc.eu/ The threat of mass casualty incidents or medical surges to healthcare systems has always been present. Preparing essential parts of the healthcare system such as hospitals and their partners to prevent, respond, and rapidly recover from these threats is critical for protecting and securing the entire health infrastructure. Large-scale disaster situations causing mass casualty incidents are characterised by large numbers of same-type injuries which require immediate and simultaneous medical intervention and means of support such as ambulances, surgeries, specialists, diagnostic equipment and others. These characteristics underline the need for enhanced communication between medical institutions and other organisations involved in disaster management. At the same time, the surge of demand for services to patients points to the need for better organisation within hospitals concerning the deployment of specialists and the availability of medical supplies, transportation, rooms and equipment. While a variety of incidents may necessitate an emergency response, different types of such incidents (natural disasters, explosions, humanitarian crises and others) mean a different framework for responders. While health responders are ubiquitous in their involvement with the response to an emergency situation, the parameters regarding how they are involved greatly differ with the type of threat represented. The COncORDE project will develop a Decision Support System (DSS) to improve preparedness and interoperability of medical services during an emergency which affects the health of the population at local, regional or cross-border level. The project will incorporate existing operational assets related to security, trust and infrastructure and leverage them within the DSS. PSCE is mainly involved in dissemination activities and definitions of working groups of stakeholders and experts. → Visit COncORDE: http://www.concorde-project.eu/ CiProVoT
The project’s main activities will consist of:
- Development of innovative educational tools for Civil Protection volunteers
- Increasing awareness of the importance of natural disaster prevention and management of emergency situations in the civil protection
- Identifying good practices at European level comparing different national approaches related to CP Management and CP volunteers involvement
- Spreading information about the normative related to CP at EU level and providing a deep and specialized knowledge on CP voluntarism
Natural Hazard & Disaster Risk Reduction
Emergency Planning
ICT for Disaster Risk Reduction activitiesDRIVER+
DRIVER+ - Driving Innovation in Crisis Management for European Resilience
• A pan-European Test-Bed for Crisis Management capability development enabling practitionersto create a space in which stakeholders can collaborate in testing and evaluating new products, tools, processes or organisational solutions.
• A Portfolio of Solutions (PoS) in the form of a database-driven website that aims at documenting all DRIVER+ solutions. These will be tested via trials during the project lifetime. Ultimately, the PoS will be opened up to any external organisations willing to share data and experiences of solutions.
• A shared understanding in Crisis Management across Europe, through the enhancement of the cooperation framework. This will be achieved, amongst others, by building a dedicated Community of Practice in Crisis Management (CoPCM), closely aligned to and supporting the Community of Users (CoU) initiative from DG HOME and the Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre (DRMKC).E2mC
E2mC
CRISMA
Modelling crisis management for improved action and preparedness
BROADMAP
BROADMAP
EMYNOS
EMYNOS - Next generation emergency communications
EPISECC
EPISECC - Establish pan-European information space to enhance security of citizens
COncORDE
COncORDE - Development of Coordination Mechanisms during Different Kinds of Emergencies