VALKYRIES

Harmonization and Pre-Standardization of Equipment, Training and Tactical Coordinated procedures for First Aid Vehicles deployment on European multi-victim Disasters.

VALKYRIES

Will increase EU overall resilience and effectiveness in cross-border disasters with multiple victims by enhancing transnational and cross-sectorial trust among different players and in their interaction with data-driven technologies.

VALKYRIES

The integration of the harmonized solutions will constitute the SIGRUN platform, providing advanced communications, information sharing and tactical C&C services for the first-aid responders.

VALKYRIES

Four use cases will be developed on cross-frontier and cross-sectorial BLOS (Beyond Line of Sight) scenarios, where the usual communications infrastructure could have been damaged, and emergency response teams are deployed without an accurate view of the operation environment.

2nd VALKYRIES NEWSLETTER



SEPT 2022

Description and Benefits of VALKYRIES

The emergency medical system has a unique role when deployed as first aid response on disaster situations, where Multi-Casualty Incidents (MCI) tend to reveal resource insufficiency (rescue personnel, healthcare providers, facilities, etc.), significant breakdowns in the local health care facilities usually damaged or destroyed, malfunctioning communication infrastructure and the jeopardized ability to deliver additional resources. In order to address these situations and related ones, the different EU emergency teams have been quick to adopt the latest technological advances, such as digitalization, new generation communication networks, drones, etc., which have led to new opportunities for procedural and collaborative improvements.

However, given the rapid proliferation of new related opportunities, their implementation often significantly precedes their standardization, leading to different intersecting practices. This reduced cross-border collaboration opportunities and difficult to define, schedule and enforce joint lines of industrial and research development able to bring common disruptive solutions to the EU response teams.

The challenge of this project is to analyse these gaps for then designing key pre-standardization and harmonization actions to be implemented in a reference integration platform and demonstrated in four different cross-border and cross-sectorial scenarios.

The consortium is coordinated by Indra and brings together 17 partners from 8 EU countries.

H2020 VALKYRIES Project

H2020 VALKYRIES Project

Title: Harmonization and Pre-Standardization of Equipment, Training and Tactical Coordinated procedures for First Aid Vehicles deployment on European multi-victim Disasters

Type of action: Innovation Action
Topic: SU-DRS03-2018-2019-2020 Grant number: 101020676
Total Cost: € 6 895 326,25
EC Contribution: € 5 995 757,50
Start Date: 01/10/2021
End Date: 30/09/2023
Duration: 24 months
Project Web Site: https://www.valkyries-h2020.eu/
Key Words: Emergencies, Multi-victim disasters, Cross-border, Cross-sectorial, Reference Integration, Harmonization
Coordinator: Indra Sistemas SA

The SIGRUN reference integration

SIGRUN is a combination of interconnected and harmonized solutions, oriented to emulate advanced communications, information sharing and tactical C2 services for the first-aid responders. The SIGRUN platform will result from the integration of real, simulated, and digitalized (e.g., Digital Twins) first aid EMS systems and assets, where harmonization on the disrupting opportunities can be implemented and verified. Deployed together with the VALKYRIES testbeds, virtual labs or demonstration environments, SIGRUN will be integrated for assisting the creation and dynamically update of a synthetic and immersive working environment for generating, integrating, managing and visualizing the project resulting harmonization experiments and their effect.
All of this will be developed under an isolated multi-domain environment where the real operation of existing solutions can be combined with simulated EMS response missions, communications, feeds, etc. As agreed with the participant end-user, SIGRUN will depict a C2 focused platform to be held by two core functional pillars:

The later does not imply a complete App development but harmonization of specific elements that compose it. Accordingly, it is expected that harmonization opportunities to be selected for deployment and verification on which the proposed harmonization framework will be applied, will mostly rely on them.



Expected early identified technological scope to settle the SIGRUN core functional pillars

An early effort between Consortium and committed end-users (as partners or external advisors) agreed that the selection of harmonization to be deployed in SIGRUN will prioritize to provide added value on the adoption of the following technological background toward achieve:


  • Distributed computing and information management capabilities, with the possibility of deploying digital resources in the kinetic scenario of operations (Edge, IoT, etc.), as well as at the level of centralized coordination infrastructure (e.g., C&C).
  • Compatibility with existing regulations, protocols and standards (Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA), Ultra High Frequency (UHF), etc.), exploring gaps and improvements under the umbrella of the latest enablers.
  • Context-aware, allowing recalibrations according to the acquired situational awareness.
  • Adoption of self-organizing network paradigms (e.g., SDN, NFV, SON, 5G), thus allowing to prioritize services/capacities as required by the mission (e.g., security vs. latency, QoS vs. connectivity, etc.) while deploying new services at the edge.
  • Point-to-point distributed and intelligent trust throughout the entire information management cycle.
  • Protection of communications to cyber-physical threats (e.g., EM, jamming, cyberattacks, etc.) and misuse (configuration errors, data leakage, etc.). Protection against the vertical/horizontal propagation of cyber-physical threats to the operations plane, facilitating the acquisition of situational cyber-awareness and inference of probability and impact.
  • Exchange of information and services between security platforms and domains, facilitating cooperation on participants, and improving cooperation between national and European devices.
  • Telecare, wearable devices, triage, patient information, mHealth.


Which external experts are being consulted in the harmonization framework application decisions?

VALKYRIES ambitions to channel the attention of the main EU actors in early response to health emergencies regardless of their area of operation (local, regional, national, European, international) or sector (health services, civil protection, LEAs, etc.).
Despite the VALKYRIES Consortium is already composed by relevant related end-users, practitioners and/or critical infrastructure operators, which are enumerated below:


  • Servicio de Urgencias y Emergencias de la Comunidad de Madrid (SUMMA112) - Spain
  • Bulgarian Defence Institute - Bulgaria
  • Hospital do Espirito Santo Évora - Portugal
  • Azienda Regionale Emergenza Urgenza - Italy
  • University of South-Eastern Norway - Norway
  • Hellenic Rescue Team - Greece

It is being assisted by three bodies where partners and external expert will cooperate: External Advisory Board, Ethics Panel and Innovation Board. In addition, the project will hold three VALKYRIES Workshops, which are expected to gather more than 30 international experts per edition. The first Workshop took place between on March-May 2022 and the second is planned for the end of September 2022.



VALKYRIES Impact and Events

2nd plenary meeting

On May 18-20th, the second plenary of the project took place in Pisa. Throughout these three days, a review of the progress of the project was carried out in detail and especially relevant topics were discussed, such as the design of the architecture of the SIGRUN reference integration, the results obtained from the analysis carried out on the minimum data sets and the next steps to define the harmonization actions to respond to the gaps detected in each of the work streams. In addition, the consortium had the opportunity to meet in person for the first time and speak directly about numerous topics related to the project.

CPDP Conference

On May 25th, representatives from Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna and Indra participated in the Computer Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) conferences in conjunction with the 1st Legal and Ethical Workshop of the project. Denise Amram and Andrea Parziale moderated the panel and Pedro Ramón y Cajal Ramo presented the VALKYRIES project. Some of the main contributions and challenges to improve interoperability and the need for standardisation were detailed. Details were also given on some technical aspects aimed at improving and protecting communications, data security and compatibility, among others.

I Research and Innovation Symposium for European Security and Defence

From May 31st to June 2nd, 2022, the International Fair Plovdiv took place in Bulgaria. As part of the event, Rumen Daton from Indra was invited to present VALKYRIES project at the I Research and Innovation Symposium for European Security and Defence” (RISE-SD) organized by the Bulgarian Defence Institute, AFCEA Sofia Chapter and Information Technologies Institute, as part of the XV th International Defence Equipment Exhibition “HEMUS 2022 – Defence, Antiterrorism & Security”. In this forum, several EU-funded projects within the security and defence area were shared, which gave them visibility and underlined the importance of cooperation between industry, research centres and security and defence practitioners. The event had the support of organizations as notable as NATO, the European Commission or the European Defence Agency, among others.

XXXII SEMES National Congress

Our partner Tassica exhibited a Poster about VALKYRIES project at the XXXII SEMES National Congress that took place from June 8th to 10th in Vigo, Spain.
The poster presents the main objectives and expected results of the project, as well as the work methodology that the consortium is using.

I National Emergency Congress

On June 9th, the I National Emergency Congress took place in Spain, where First Responders from various sectors, large companies, SMEs, etc. met at the National School of Civil Protection in Madrid to carry out a series of conferences and demonstrations where the need for public-private collaboration in emergency environments and the need to integrate new disruptive technologies were highlighted. As part of the event, the VALKYRIES’ C&D Manager Marta Irene García Cid participated in a round table together with representatives of the CDTI, Civil Protection and the School of Rescue and Detection with Dogs.

First VALKYRIES, Demonstration and Standardization workshops

2nd Ethical-Legal Workshop

The second ethical legal workshop of the VALKYRIES project is the opportunity to openly present and discuss the external experts the first release of the protocols for innovators. A Q&A session will be carried out after the presentation followed by an interesting simulation. The event will take place on September 29th in virtual format (Webex) and can be attended by all of you. Click here to access the meeting link.

ARATOS.NET LTD
AZIENDA REGIONALE EMERGENZA URGENZA
BLOCKCHAIN2050 BV
BULGARIAN RED CROSS
BULGARIAN DEFENCE INSTITUTE
HOSPITAL DO ESPIRITO SANTO ÉVORA
INDRA SISTEMAS S.A.
INTERNATIONAL SECURITY AND EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE
KENTRO MELETON ASFALEIAS
SERVICIO DE URGENCIAS Y EMERGENCIAS DE LA COMUNIDAD DE MADRID (SUMMA112)
NOVOTEC
PARTICIPLE
UNIVERSIDAD DE MURCIA
TASSICA EMERGENCY, TRAINING & RESEARCH S.A.
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH-EASTERN NORWAY
Santa Anna
HRT