PRAETORIAN strategic goal is to increase the security and resilience of European CIs, facilitating the coordinated protection of interrelated CI against combined physical and cyber threats. To that end, the project will provide a multidimensional (economical, technological, policy, societal) yet installation-specific toolset comprising: (i) a Physical Situation Awareness system, (ii) a Cyber Situation Awareness system; (iii) a Hybrid Situation Awareness system, which will include digital twins of the infrastructure under protection; and (iv) a Coordinated Response system. The PRAETORIAN toolset will support the security managers of Critical Infrastructures (CI) in their decision making to anticipate and withstand potential cyber, physical or combined security threats to their own infrastructures and other interrelated CIs that could have a severe impact on their performance and/or the security of the population in their vicinity. The project will specifically tackle (i.e. prevent, detect, response and, in case of a declared attack, mitigate) human-made cyber and physical attacks or natural disasters affecting CIs. It will also address how an attack or incident in a specific CI can jeopardise the normal operation of other neighbouring/interrelated CIs, and how to make all of them more resilient, by predicting cascading effects and proposing a unified response among CIs and assisting First Responder teams. PRAETORIAN is a CI-led, user-driven project, which will demonstrate its results in three international pilot clusters –some of them cross border– involving 9 outstanding critical infrastructures: 2 international airports, 2 ports, 3 hospitals and 2 power plants.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, the frequency of severe weather incidents has quintupled over the last five decades, causing more than 100 000 fatalities and 1.5 trillion euros of economic losses in Europe (EU). Consequently, disaster management capabilities need to be enhanced in this fast-evolving context. Robotics can play a crucial role to improve first responders’ safety and effectiveness in their operations. HURRICANE is a 15 partners multidisciplinary consortium aiming to overcome limitations that are still holding back these cutting-edge innovations from becoming a disaster management standard. HURRICANE will unlock the potential of UGV operation in hazardous environment, relying on enhanced vision capabilities and smart integration over a holistic, resilient and real-time situational awareness infrastructure that includes innovative UAV-UGV cooperation pathways (laser-based charging, UAV supporting UGV regarding route planning) and multi-technology communication infrastructure (5G, RF, optical wireless). Data-driven optimization models will provide recommendations through a user-friendly API to support FR’s tactics. Three complementary pilots will be implemented to demonstrate the benefits brought by HURRICANE solutions, in several challenging environments: peri-urban areas (Corsica), mountains (Alps) and wildfires (Andalusia). Last, but not least, EU-wide advanced training modules will be implemented to raise awareness among FR about these innovative technologies, integrating new operational procedures. At the end of the project, HURRICANE will show improved hazard management efficiency (60% operation time reduction, 95% false positive readout reduction), with reduced FR exposure to harmful situations, strengthened EU robotics industry leadership (5M€ of revenues and 50 jobs). In 2028, training will be provided for 100 FRs across 15 EU countries, aiming to achieve a total of 10,000 trained FRs by the year 2035.

ARTEMis will pave the way towards a new era of harmonised, standardised protocols, tools and procedures for emergency management and risk awareness in a pan-European level, delivering innovations in 6 concrete pillars, namely: (i) Assessment and Analysis: Conduct a comprehensive assessment of existing alert and impact forecasting systems and emergency management protocols across Europe for among others identifying gaps and areas for improvement in current practices; (ii) Development of an Integrated Emergency Management Framework: Collaborate with European, national, regional, and local authorities to develop an integrated framework for emergency management making sure that the framework leverages existing systems like the Copernicus Emergency Management Service; (iii) Harmonisation of Alert and Impact Forecasting Systems: Proposal of homogeneous methods for identifying vulnerability and exposure and creation of harmonised protocols for alert and impact forecasting systems, ensuring timely information dissemination to civil protection authorities; (iv) Implementation and Testing: Validation testing of the integrated framework and harmonised protocols in selected regions prone to natural disasters. Conduct exercises (tabletop and full scale) to test the effectiveness of the new systems and protocols; (v) Knowledge Transfer and Capacity Building: Organisation of workshops, training sessions, and webinars to build the capacity of relevant stakeholders and develop training materials and resources that can be used for ongoing education and awareness; and (vi) Enhancing Risk Awareness: Development of innovative tools to visualise risks, vulnerability, and exposure using impact forecasting data and satellite information. Implement public awareness campaigns to educate EU citizens about local risks and preparedness measures.

Forest fires are exacerbated by extreme weather conditions, which are increasing both in frequency and in magnitude due to climate change effects. This points to the need for improving the effectiveness of emergency management solutions aimed to help society in becoming more resilient to emergencies arising before, during and after forest fire events. Therefore, it is proposed to realize a comprehensive Emergency Management System (EMS) that we name SAFERS: Structured Approaches for Forest fire Emergencies in Resilient Societies. SAFERS will act along the key phases of the emergency management cycle, coupling information from EO data and services offered by Copernicus and GEOSS, crowdsourced data from social media and from specific applications that can be used by both citizens as well as from in-field professional agents, data generated by accurate sensors to detect smoke or fires. Advanced algorithm based on Artificial Intelligence will be used to generate risk maps and early warnings in the preparedness phase, estimate the forest fire extension and its propagation in function of the forecasted weather and soil conditions in the response phase, compute the impacts of an extinguished fire in terms of economic losses and monitor the soil recovery in the post-event phase.