The Mediterranean and Black Sea region is characterised by a very volatile and dynamically changing security environment that pose severe threats and challenges on the societies and prosperity. The MEDEA project, during its 60 months of implementation provides funding for four interrelated actions: (i) Establish and Operate the MEDEA network, a multi-disciplinary network of security practitioners, with active links to policy makers and users/providers of security innovations across the M&BS countries focusing in Border Protection and other Security- and Disaster-Related tasks. During the project duration, MEDEA members will engage in activities towards maintaining its sustainability and longevity after the financing of this project ends, (ii) Engage participants in anticipatory governance on emerging security challenges that the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions would face in the coming years (present until +10 years), which concretely operationalizes the backbone of the project in a triple structure: a) understanding unsatisfactory state of play, b) design the desirable future and c) define a resilient pathway on how to achieve this, (iii) Push for the “co-creation” of security technology and capabilities innovations between practitioners and innovation suppliers, which is based upon their evaluation and prioritization on multi-criteria analysis (technology, operational and cost-benefit, etc.) and also linked to Human Development, Policy Making and Organizational Improvements in-terms of facilitating its use by the practitioners (iv) Establish and annually update the Mediterranean Security Research and Innovation Agenda (MSRIA), that identifies areas where security & defence research is needed and the establishment of recommendations for European Security & Defence technology investments.

Exposure of citizens to potential disasters has led to vulnerable societies that require risk reduction measures. Drinking water is one main source of risk when its safety and security is not ensured. aqua3S combines novel technologies in water safety and security, aiming to standardise existing sensor technologies complemented by state-of-the-art detection mechanisms. On the one hand sensor networks are deployed in water supply networks and sources, supported by complex sensors for enhanced detection; on the other hand sensor measurements are supported by videos from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), satellite images and social media observations from the citizens that report low-quality water in their area (e.g. by colorisation), creating also social awareness and an interactive knowledge transfer. Semantic representation and data fusion provides intelligent DSS alerts and messages to the public through first responders’ mediums. The proposed technical solution is designed to offer a very effective detection system, taking into account the cost of the aqua3S platform and targets at very high return over investment ratio. A strategy for the insertion of aqua3S solution into the market is designed towards the standardisation of the proposed technologies and the aqua3S secure platform.

The creation of the Schengen area has been one of the major achievements of the EU. However, this agreement requires countries to cooperate tightly in order to keep a high level of security at their internal borders, as well as to share the responsibility of managing external borders. Such a variety of borders (land, sea and air) and current challenges requires a consistent approach to border surveillance, based on a plethora of heterogeneous assets. These can be manned or unmanned, ranging from sensors (optical, radar, IR) to unmanned platforms (UAV, UGV, USV or UUV), and need to be combined to offer an integrated situational picture of the area under surveillance and of their location. In order to effectively control their operation and manage the large amounts of data collected by them, new approaches for command and control need to be considered, allowing efficient interaction between the operator and the different assets in the field. CAMELOT proposes to develop and demonstrate different advanced command and control service modules for multiple platform domains, based on a SOA architecture that specifies internal and external interfaces, allowing the development of a modular and scalable command and control station, customisable to the user needs. This architecture can be based on results of previous studies and work or open architectures that may prove more suitable and the interfaces can take advantage of the standardisation work that has been done already. After the definition, CAMELOT partners will prototype service modules according to their expertise, background individual technologies and practitioner needs. These will be integrated progressively in specific testing along the project. This prototype development approach will culminate in 2 final demonstrations involving end users and relevant stakeholders, to achieve a maturity of TRL6 (for most individual technologies supporting the functionalities for border surveillance) and an IRL of 7 for CAMELOT.

ARESIBO aims at improving the efficiency of the border surveillance systems by providing the operational teams and the tactical command and control level with an accurate and comprehensive information. The pillars of research in ARESIBO are three-fold: 1. Set-up a complete configuration at tactical and execution level to optimise the collaboration between human and sensors (fixed and mobile), 2. Improve situation awareness by enhancing the understanding of the situation through adapted processing of sensor data, correlation between heterogeneous data and information and creation of knowledge through deep learning techniques and 3. Create a situation awareness capability at C2 level that will combine reports on previous missions, real time situation understanding and threat analysis for future actions. This capability will be used to optimise the operations (teams deployment and sensor positioning) as well as an online briefing tool for the teams that will be able to access to the results of the previous missions while in the field. ARESIBO integrates research activities in the domain of 1. surveillance platforms (air, ground, surface, underwater) to optimise the collaborative capabilities of the platforms and their positioning (between themselves and with the teams), 2. Sensor processing to interpret, fuse and correlate all the data to produce information and knowledge and 3. Augmented reality techniques to elaborate and provide to the operators a situation awareness picture which is fit for their missions (minimum information for maximal understanding) both as team level and tactical C2 level. The ARESIBO system will be developed incrementally during the 3 years with two major versions that will lead to sub-versions for land and maritime borders. The system will be tested and assessed in 1. a controlled environment enabling testing at any time without pre-requisite authorisations and 2. in real conditions in Finland, Greece, Romania and Portugal for the 2 versions.

A methodology for tracking and analysing the needs for standardization and certification harmonization thorough the project life cycle will be defined and enforced, which will allow the early identification of issues related to the conceptualization, design, implementation, integration and deployment of tools for support the EU disaster resiliency; which will be facilitated by a complete consultation strategy to the different stakeholders that are expected to act at each capability development phase, ranging from providers to end users. On these grounds H2020-VALKYRIES will develop, integrate and demonstrate capabilities for enabling immediate and coordinated emergency response including search and rescue, security and health, in scenarios of natural/provoked catastrophes with multiple victims, with special application in cases in which several regions or countries are affected and hence greater interoperability being required. H2020-VALKYRIES will propose both design and development of a modular, interoperable, scalable and secure platform, which will allow the integration between legacy solutions and new technologies. The platform will be able to deploy services and dynamically adapt its behaviour, as the emergency requires it. A series of use cases and demonstrators will be developed placing an emphasis on cross-frontier and cross-sectorial BLOS (Beyond Line of Sight) scenarios, where the usual communications infrastructure could have been damaged, and emergency response teams are deployed without an accurate view of the operation environment