From 22 to 26 October the head office of Entente Valabre, a French civil-protection organization, hosted the second of the four trials scheduled for the DRIVER+ project (Driving Innovation in Crisis Management for European Resilience).

Driver +, a European Commission, FP7-financed project, aims to come up with an answer to the current and future challenges posed by the increasingly serious consequences of natural disasters and terrorist attacks. In pursuit of this overarching aim the project is assessing and implementing groundbreaking solutions that can be used jointly to cope with the various types of large-scale crises. This involves the holding of four trials and a final demonstration to investigate innovative solutions under simulated crisis conditions.

Each one of the trials – the first two already conducted in Poland and France plus the final two to be held in the Netherlands and Austria – will provide priceless feedback for the pan-European testbed being developed under the project. The DRIVER+ testbed will create a unique opportunity for a transformative change by developing a coherent infrastructure for trialing solutions well into the future. This will open up the pooling and sharing of resources across Europe, allowing experience from trialing in different contexts to cross-fertilize.

The results of the assessment of the solutions will be stored in the Portfolio of Solutions (PoS), a website that describes the capabilities of all the available DRIVER+ solutions. The PoS will then be made available to any external organization, enabling it to share data and experiences on its own solutions. This will in turn pave the way for successful implementation and use of solutions by other practitioners.

As well as participating in all DRIVER+ subprojects, GMV is also helping to work towards a pan-European testbed to deal with crises. Furthermore, the solutions included in the PoS, all of which will be put through their paces during the project trials, take in GMV’s complete SOCRATES OC operating center.

This second trial was conducted entirely in a virtual environment created by a fire simulator. This presented the timeline of various events related to a forest fire in southern France, threatening nearby towns and followed by cascade effects on a nearby chemical plant. The trialed solutions focused on support for firefighters, emergency medical services and the European Civil Protection Mechanism plus other authorities. This was done by setting up a coordinated management framework giving an overview of response operations and ensuring an efficient information-exchange system that also brought relevant information from social media into disaster management operations.

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