Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SUNRISE (Strategies and Technologies for United and Resilient Critical Infrastructures and Vital Services in Pandemic-Stricken Europe)
Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2023-09-30
With Europe still recovering from COVID pandemic, there is a pressing need for developing resilience against potential future threats like new pandemics, climate-related crisis, scarcity of vital supplies, limited mobility, disruption in telecommunications or massive cyber attacks against key targets. SUNRISE is a project about saving lives and ensuring the European welfare state. Critical infrastructures (CIs) and essential services are fundamental for stable societies. SUNRISE aims at shielding them so that they will continue to work with efficacy even in emergency scenarios. For this mission SUNRISE relies on three main pillars: 1) collaboration among stakeholders both at cross-border and cross-sectorial levels, given the strong interdependency among CIs; 2) the development of strategic plans with collaboration in policy-making and 3) the development of exceptional technology to protect human, physical and digital resources.
The technology area of SUNRISE envisions the implementation of a suite of four tools: 1) Tool for Risk-based access control to premises in emergency scenarios; 2) Tool for demand prediction management of vital resources; 3) Tool for cyberphysical resilience and 4) Tool for remote infrastructure inspection.
Basing on these three pillars SUNRISE aims to ensure greater availability, reliability and continuity of CIs including transport, energy, water, telecommunications, healthcare and others.
All the SUNRISE results - strategies and tools - are co-created and piloted in a real-world setting with several CIs authorities and operators from across eight European Countries: Slovenia, Spain, Italy, Serbia, France, Estonia, Israel and Czechia.
The technology area of SUNRISE envisions the implementation of a suite of four tools: 1) Tool for Risk-based access control to premises in emergency scenarios; 2) Tool for demand prediction management of vital resources; 3) Tool for cyberphysical resilience and 4) Tool for remote infrastructure inspection.
Basing on these three pillars SUNRISE aims to ensure greater availability, reliability and continuity of CIs including transport, energy, water, telecommunications, healthcare and others.
All the SUNRISE results - strategies and tools - are co-created and piloted in a real-world setting with several CIs authorities and operators from across eight European Countries: Slovenia, Spain, Italy, Serbia, France, Estonia, Israel and Czechia.
We established a framework of collaboration among CI operators, fostering the exchange of experiences and good practices. Firstly, we focused on the past, to analyze what was done well and what did not work in the emergency of COVID. Then, we focused on the future, trying to devise future emergency scenarios (epidemiological, climate, hybrid) and make the CI operators to put themselves in that context and think about the types of measures they would have to adopt having to do with the identification of vulnerable workers and impact, personal and environmental interventions or response prioritization. We also understood that the impact of a pandemic does not end within national borders, so it is necessary to understand the roles, processes, experiences through the prism of cross-border cooperations between CI operators.
SUNRISE strategy to help CIs prepare and respond to pandemic-specific risks has the following pillars: modelling disease spreading; modelling climate change; modelling socio-economic impact; modelling CI interdependency; modelling and simulating cascading effects and finally carrying out a risk assessment including what-if analysis. For the different pillars and aiming at a joint vision, partners have worked with a very heterogeneous and wide catalogue of datasets. This strategy is set keeping in mind the CER directive and NIS2 regulation. Partners have worked on identifying criteria to label a service or entity as essential, have analyzed interconnection and dependencies among critical infrastructures. Additionally, pandemic-specific risk assessment and mitigation, including specific countermeasures that need to take into account the economic and societal aspects. In this sense, risk assessment is another important piece in the puzzle. In SUNRISE a specific risk assessment tool is developed to provide CI operators and their supply chain´s organizations monitoring and forecasting of pandemic and climate emergencies; feeding with useful information the business continuity and decision-making processes; and computing an organization´s risk score.
SUNRISE has released the initial Y1 version of the four technological tools envisioned in the project conception, namely: Risk-Based Access Control Tool (WP4); Demand Prediction Management (WP5); Cyber Physical Resilience (WP6) and Remote Infrastructure Inspection (WP7). In the first year a TRL 5+ has been achieved for all the tools.
SUNRISE strategy to help CIs prepare and respond to pandemic-specific risks has the following pillars: modelling disease spreading; modelling climate change; modelling socio-economic impact; modelling CI interdependency; modelling and simulating cascading effects and finally carrying out a risk assessment including what-if analysis. For the different pillars and aiming at a joint vision, partners have worked with a very heterogeneous and wide catalogue of datasets. This strategy is set keeping in mind the CER directive and NIS2 regulation. Partners have worked on identifying criteria to label a service or entity as essential, have analyzed interconnection and dependencies among critical infrastructures. Additionally, pandemic-specific risk assessment and mitigation, including specific countermeasures that need to take into account the economic and societal aspects. In this sense, risk assessment is another important piece in the puzzle. In SUNRISE a specific risk assessment tool is developed to provide CI operators and their supply chain´s organizations monitoring and forecasting of pandemic and climate emergencies; feeding with useful information the business continuity and decision-making processes; and computing an organization´s risk score.
SUNRISE has released the initial Y1 version of the four technological tools envisioned in the project conception, namely: Risk-Based Access Control Tool (WP4); Demand Prediction Management (WP5); Cyber Physical Resilience (WP6) and Remote Infrastructure Inspection (WP7). In the first year a TRL 5+ has been achieved for all the tools.
1) Strategy for Critical Infrastructure Operators: The SUNRISE strategy will strengthen CI awareness and resilience as well as business continuity by building a precise model of pandemics and incorporating climate change information. The basis for the SUNRISE strategy represents an epidemiological characterisation of pandemic risks and will consider new insights from the spreading of infectious diseases and climate change, thus fostering a multi-dimensional risk assessment and mitigation analysis.
2) Risk-based Access Control (RiBAC): The RiBAC tool will help to ensure that operation of critical infrastructure will not be disrupted by another pandemic or similar event that would bring challenges to safety & security measures of physical access to the vital facilities, while also addressing a high degree of privacy requirements.
3) Tool for Resource Demand Prediction and Management: The Tool is an essential solution to ensure businesses, homes and critical service providers can continue to function. It will help operators to better prepare for periods of high demand to avoid disruptions to vital resources such as life-saving hospital equipment and clean drinking water.
4) Tool for Cyber Physical Resilience: This tool will provide an early warning system that will help inform authorities, security analysts and CI operators to prevent cyber threats from happening and better manage cyber-attacks by understanding their effect and how best to respond.
5) Tool for Remote Physical Infrastructure Inspection: This tool will remove the need for people to inspect infrastructures physically. Using an approach that enables remote inspection reduces the number of people put in danger to detect the problem and reduces the risk of staff becoming injured or unwell.
2) Risk-based Access Control (RiBAC): The RiBAC tool will help to ensure that operation of critical infrastructure will not be disrupted by another pandemic or similar event that would bring challenges to safety & security measures of physical access to the vital facilities, while also addressing a high degree of privacy requirements.
3) Tool for Resource Demand Prediction and Management: The Tool is an essential solution to ensure businesses, homes and critical service providers can continue to function. It will help operators to better prepare for periods of high demand to avoid disruptions to vital resources such as life-saving hospital equipment and clean drinking water.
4) Tool for Cyber Physical Resilience: This tool will provide an early warning system that will help inform authorities, security analysts and CI operators to prevent cyber threats from happening and better manage cyber-attacks by understanding their effect and how best to respond.
5) Tool for Remote Physical Infrastructure Inspection: This tool will remove the need for people to inspect infrastructures physically. Using an approach that enables remote inspection reduces the number of people put in danger to detect the problem and reduces the risk of staff becoming injured or unwell.