DRiving InnoVation in crisis management for European Resilience (DRIVER)

Basic data for this project

Description

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. Therefore DRIVER focuses on augmenting rather than replacing existing capabilities and will aim at producing a comprehensive, well-balanced and cost-effective Portfolio of CM tools exploiting high potential RTD work from the last decade, not least in FP7 and FP6 projects. This portfolio will address not only needs of professional responders but also of society at large. DRIVER will carry out experimentation campaigns in three strands: tools and methods for responders, resilience of civil society and learning by both. The intra-strand experimentation leads into two Joint Experiment campaigns and a Final Demo focusing on challenges requiring highly complex interaction between CM tools. To evaluate and benchmark these CM tools, a strong evidence base for tool selection is crucial; to this end DRIVER will build a distributed European CM Test-bed, itself a major innovation. To maximise impact beyond the scope of the project and of the DRIVER consortium it is necessary to develop the sustainability of the European Test-bed, the exploitation of the DRIVER Portfolio of Tools and to make emerge a European CM community, which shares a common CM understanding and is increasingly willing to share capabilities and collaborate in CM innovation. These three objectives need and feed each other, thus developing Europe’s ability to continue adapting its CM capabilities to emerging needs long after the project end.