CARR

In recent years crises and disasters (Eyjafjallajökull and Deepwater Horizon 2010, Fukushima Daiichi 2011) have made it obvious that a more resilient approach to preparing for and dealing with such events is needed. DARWIN will improve response to expected and unexpected crises affecting critical infrastructures and social structures. It addresses the management of both man-made events (e.g. cyber-attacks) and natural events (e.g. earthquakes). The main objective is the development of European resilience management guidelines. These will improve the ability of stakeholders to anticipate, monitor, respond, adapt, learn and evolve, to operate efficiently in the face of crises. Guidelines will be presented in formats for easy usage and maintenance to avoid them being dust-collectors on a shelf. To enable dynamic, user-friendly guidelines the project will adapt innovative tools (e.g. serious gaming, training packages), test and validate the guidelines, and establish knowledge about how organisations can implement guidelines to improve resilience. A multidisciplinary approach is applied, involving experts in the field of resilience, crisis and risk management, social media and service providers in the Air Traffic Management and health care domains. To ensure transnational, cross-sector applicability, long-term relevance and uptake of project results, a Community of Crisis and Resilience Practitioners (CoCRP) will be established, including stakeholders and end-users from other domains and critical infrastructures and resilience experts. The CoCRP will be involved in an iterative evaluation process to provide feedback on the guidelines. The target beneficiaries of DARWIN are crisis management actors and stakeholders responsible for public safety, such as critical infrastructures and service providers, which might be affected by a crisis, as well as the public and media. The project duration will be 36 months, requesting financing of €4.9M.

Whilst citizen participation in environmental policy making is still in its infancy, there are signs of a growing level of interest. The majority of citizens, though, both as individuals and as groups often feel disengaged from influencing environmental policies. They also remain unaware of publicly available information, such as the GEOSS or Copernicus initiatives. The SCENT project will alleviate this barrier. It will enable citizens to become the ‘eyes’ of the policy makers by monitoring land-cover/use changes in their everyday activities. This is done through a constellation of smart collaborative technologies delivered by the SCENT toolbox in TRLs 6-8: i) low-cost and portable data collection tools, ii) an innovative crowd-sourcing platform, iii) serious gaming applications for a large-scale image collection and semantic annotation, iv) a powerful machine-learning based intelligence engine for image and text classification, v) an authoring tool for an easy customization by policy makers, vi) numerical models for mapping land-cover changes to quantifiable impact on flood risks and vii) a harmonization platform, consolidating data and adding it to GEOSS and national repositories as OGC-based observations. SCENT will be evaluated in two large scale demonstrations in Kifisos Attica and Danube Delta. Our consortium covers the complete stakeholder chain: industries in machine learning (IBM), SMEs in crowd-sourcing (U-Hopper), gaming (Xteam) and awareness raising (Carr), leading research institutes with expertise in hydrodynamic modelling (UNESCO-IHE), data harmonization and authoring tools (ICCS) and environmental monitoring (DDNI), NGOs at the pilot sites (HRTA, SOR) and policy makers/public bodies (Region of Attica). The SCENT initiative will go beyond the current project and form a European-wide citizen movement, created and fostered by the SCENT stakeholders, that will ensure its sustainability and its complementarity with existing citizen partnerships.

DELTA proposes a DR management platform that distributes parts of the Aggregator’s intelligence into lower layers of a novel architecture, based on VPP principles, in order to establish a more easily manageable & computationally efficient DR solution, ultimately aiming to introduce scalability & adaptiveness into the Aggregator’s DR toolkits; the DELTA engine will be able to adopt & integrate multiple strategies & policies provided from its energy market stakeholders, making it authentically modular & future-proof. DELTA will also deliver a fully autonomous architectural design, enabling end-users to escape the hassle of responding to complex price/incentive-based signals, while facilitating active, aware & engaged prosumers, based on innovative award schemes, a social collaboration platform & enhanced DR visualisation. Provision of full-scale market & grid services will be made possible by delivering explicit & implicit-based DR elasticity services, while pushing current market regulatory limitations so that they can be surpassed, and satisfying potential grid constraints related to flexibility activation through Multi-Factor Forecasting and Deep Reinforcement Learning Profiling. Furthermore, DELTA will propose & implement novel multi-agent based, self-learning energy matchmaking algorithms to enable aggregation, segmentation & coordination of several diverse supply & demand clusters, designed end-to-end using well-known, open protocols (i.e. OpenADR), for increasing interoperability. DELTA will set the milestone for data security in future DR applications by not only implementing novel block-chain methods & authentication mechanisms, but also by making use of Smart Contracts which would further secure & facilitate Aggregators-to-Prosumers transactions. Two pilots in UK & Cyprus will realise the DELTA concept, covering a wide variety of residential/tertiary loads (>11GWh), RES generation (>14GWh) & energy storage systems (>9MWh) (average annual measurements).

Smart factories are characterized by increasing automation and increasing customization. In these dynamic environments flexible and adaptive work organization is crucial both for productivity and work satisfaction. Factory2Fit project will support this development by developing adaptation solutions with which people with different skills, capabilities and preferences can be engaged, motivated and productive members of the work community in manufacturing industries. The core idea in Factory2Fit project is that the worker is an expert of his/her own work and thus (s)he shall have an active role in designing his/her work. The proposed adaptive automation solutions are based on a dynamic user model that includes physical and cognitive abilities. The worker him/herself gets feedback of his performance and skills, which supports continuous learning and competence development. Virtual factory models will be used as engaging platforms for participatory design of work practices, knowledge sharing and training, involving all the relevant stakeholders in contributing the organizational development. Contextual guidance and knowledge sharing is supported by augmented reality based tools. The adaptation solutions will be developed within three industrial pilots in actual manufacturing environments. The solutions will be generalized and disseminated widely to the manufacturing industry. Adaptive automation solutions to be developed in Factory2Fit will support fluent human-automation cooperation and will have impacts in work satisfaction, less occupational health issues, less stress, better ergonomics, better quality, less errors and better productivity. Adaptive automation supports current and forthcoming workers to develop their competences towards knowledge workers of smart factories with fulfilling work careers. This will further improve the competitiveness of European manufacturing industry and support the principle of responsible manufacturing industry.

PASSME aims to deliver industry-driven, passenger-centric novel solutions (up to TRL6) for passengers, airports and airlines to address the anticipated increase in demand for commercial flights in Europe by 2050. The goal is to reduce travel time by at least 60 minutes by integrating information between all stakeholders and transforming airport and aircraft operations and interiors to make the passenger journey time efficient, seamless, robust and accessible. This requires significant breakthrough solutions, such as: a real-time passenger-centric system for managing passenger flows that use input from the airport and passenger to provide predictive analytics on passenger flows 20-30 minutes ahead of time; a passenger independent system for managing luggage flows that reduce the time in arrival/departure airports by at least 30 minutes and increases the control passengers have over their luggage; radically redesigned passenger-centric airport and airplane processes and facilities that enable highly personalised and less stressful experience through key touch points (check-in and boarding); and a personalised device and smartphone application that measures physiological/psychological state and links with airport/airline services to provide relevant and timely information to support the passenger in decision-making. The research institutes (TUD, UNott, ICCS, TUHH, NLR, DLR) with interior design partners (Alma, Optimares) and communication experts (CARR) will work closely with Amsterdam and Hamburg airport clusters and KLM airlines to drive the user-centred design and evaluation methodology; to ensure the success of the solutions and that benefits will be shared with passengers, airlines and airports to have the necessary impact on the air transport system. Linking with the Airport Council International Europe (a selection of the 450 airports) and airport service SMEs will guarantee the results will have the maximum dissemination and exploitation across EU industries.