Modern critical infrastructures are becoming increasingly “smarter” (e.g. cities). Making the infrastructures “smarter” usually means making them smarter in normal operation and use: more adaptive, more intelligent… But will these smart critical infrastructures (SCIs) behave equally “smartly” and be “smartly resilient” also when exposed to extreme threats, such as extreme weather disasters or terrorist attacks? If making existing infrastructure “smarter” is achieved by making it more complex, would it also make it more vulnerable? Would this affect resilience of an SCI as its ability to anticipate, prepare for, adapt and withstand, respond to, and recover? These are the main questions tackled by this proposal. The proposal envisages answering the above questions in several steps. (#1) By identifying existing indicators suitable for assessing resilience of SCIs. (#2) By identifying new “smart” resilience indicators (RIs) – including those from Big Data. (#3) By developing a new advanced resilience assessment methodology (TRL4) based on smart RIs (“resilience indicators cube”, including the resilience matrix). (#4) By developing the interactive “SCI Dashboard” tool. (#5) By applying the methodology/tools in 8 case studies, integrated under one virtual, smart-city-like, European case study. The SCIs considered (in 8 European countries!) deal with energy, transportation, health, water… Results #2, #3, #4 and #5 are a breakthrough innovation. This approach will allow benchmarking the best-practice solutions and identifying the early warnings, improving resilience of SCIs against new threats and cascading and ripple effects. The benefits/savings to be achieved by the project will be assessed by the reinsurance company participant. The consortium involves 7 leading end-users/industries in the area, 7 leading research organizations, supported by academia and lead by a dedicated European organization. External world leading resilience experts will be included in the CIRAB.

A significant challenge to ensuring sustainable production and use of nanotechnologies is to understand safety and health risks of the technology and its end-products, and to implement practical strategies to manage these risks. Knowledge is growing rapidly, but effective use of this knowledge for risk management is lagging behind. We therefore need to bridge the gap between knowledge on hazard and risk, and ‘fit-for-purpose’ risk management tools and strategies supported by measurement and control methods. EC4SafeNano will bridge this gap in an efficient and sustainable way by setting up an independent, science-based, managed Centre (hub) linked with several networks (spokes) to act at the interface between research organisations, industry, regulatory bodies, and civil society. The objectives are to: 1) understand the needs of all stakeholders along the innovation value chain for nanotechnologies, ensuring safer, marketable, regulated and accepted long-lived products; 2) identify the resources and capabilities available to address these needs, and evaluate the capacity to provide technical solutions and actions; 3) build, test and benchmark a range of services, based on selected resources that answer stakeholder needs across the innovation value chain; 4) develop mechanisms and operating procedures to facilitate periodic updating of the “needs and resources” mapping and of the service provision; 5) develop networking activities aiming to share, benchmark and promote the EC4SafeNano services thereby enhancing and harmonizing the overall expertise, at EU level and beyond; and 6) develop governance rules and a strategic plan to prepare for self-sufficient operation beyond the project lifetime. The main outcome is the definition of a legal entity with operating procedures, gathering, integrating and sharing available technology, tools, skills and processes and promoting services and capabilities to support stakeholder needs in risk management and safe innovation.

Standardisation is a powerful tool to achieve better interoperability. However, it needs to overcome a lack of interest and modest participation from stakeholders. Also, promising research results are not always used as the basis for new standards. The overall goal of ResiStand is to find new ways to improve the crisis management and disaster resilience capabilities of the European Union and individual Member States through standardisation. ResiStand contributes to an improved disaster resilience by identifying and analysing the drivers, constraints and expectations of three main stakeholder communities: Standardisation Organisations, End-Users and Suppliers, consisting of researchers, industry and SMEs. Based on this information, gaps in standardisation are identified and a prioritised roadmap for new initiatives will be created. The roadmap will be complemented by a critical evaluation of standards as a tool to improve disaster resilience. ResiStand aims at implementing a pre-standardisation process that supports the development of standards. The feasibility of the process will be tested by developing a new work item. The aim is that stakeholders will continuously utilize this “ResiStand Process” in the future, and that the project delivers a better understanding of the potential of standards for contributing to an improved disaster resilience. ResiStand will support the management of increasing threats to society such as armed conflicts, terrorism, pandemics and natural disasters, which have increasingly cross-border, even global consequences due to the on-going globalisation. Protection of citizens through anticipation, preparedness, response and adaptation to crisis situations – i.e. maintaining disaster resilience – will be more efficient. Collaboration between national, European and international stakeholders will be improved by unified processes and management systems as well as by technical, procedural, operational and semantic interoperability.

Continuous, distributed changes rule today's European Digital Single Market as no single company does master its own national, in-house software. Software is mostly assembled from “the internet” and more than half come from Open Source Software repositories (some in Europe, most elsewhere). Security & privacy assurance, verification and process certification techniques designed for large, controlled updates over months or years, must now cope with small, continuous changes in weeks, happening in sub-components and decided by third party developers one did not even know they existed. AssureMOSS addresses these challenges to the fullest extent: « Open Source Software - Designed Everywhere, Secured in Europe ». AssureMOSS proposes to switch from process-based to an artefact-based security evaluation by supporting all phases of the continuous software lifecycle (Design, Develop, Deploy, Evaluate and back) their artefacts (Models, Source code, Container images, Services). The key idea is to support mechanisms for lightweigth and scalable screenings applicable automatically to the entire population of software components by - Machine intelligent identification of security issues across artifacts, - Sound analysis and verification of changes by tracing the security and privay side effects, - Business insight by risk analysis and security evaluation. This approach supports fast-paced development of better software by a new notion: continuous (re)certification. AssureMOSS has assembled a team including 5 leading Universities (Delft, Gotheborg, Trento, Vienna, VU Amsterdam), 3 innovative SMEs (FrontEndART, Search-Lab, Pluribus One), 3 Large Enterprises (E&Y, SAP, Thales) and 1 Special Interest Group Organization (EU-VRi) and an Advisory Board with key figures from OSS and industry at large. The project will generate not only a set of innovative methods and open source tools but also benchmark datasets with thousands of vulnerabilities and code that can be used by other researchers.

FIRE-IN has been designed to raise the security level of EU citizens by improving the national and European Fire & Rescue (F&R) capability development process. FIRE-IN addresses the concern that capability-driven research and innovation in this area needs much stronger guidance from practitioners and better exploitation of the technology potentially available for the discipline. We argue that this is to be achieved by practitioners more effectively coordinating on operational needs, on available research and innovation, on standardisation, and on test & demonstration and training. Further, we claim the need for the development of a common research culture that is to be achieved by better cooperation between practitioner and research/industry organisations. FIRE-IN addresses these objectives through four main areas of activity: (i) the identification and harmonisation of operational capability gaps based on the contribution provided by a significant and heterogeneous practitioner network, (ii) the identification of promising solutions to address those gaps through monitoring and screening of research outcomes and the continuous involvement of research and industry representatives, (iii) the definition of a F&R Strategic Research and Standardisation Agenda (SRSA) based on the previous elements as well as (iv) the development of a concept for more efficient use of test & demonstration and training facilities to support innovation and joint skill development. The overarching result of the project will be a proven process for organising F&R capability-driven research based on a wide practitioner and research and innovation network. The network will be linked at cross-domain and cross-border level and will feed harmonised operational requirements (or challenges) into national and EU capability development, i.e. research, innovation, procurement and standardisation programmes.