Strategies and Services for Enhanced Disruption Resilience and Cooperation in Europe

Project Information

ENDURANCE

Grant agreement ID: 101168007

DOI

10.3030/101168007

EC signature date 15 July 2024

Start date 1 October 2024

End date 30 September 2027

Funded under

• Civil Security for Society

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 4 999 776,25

Coordinated by

EVIDEN TECHNOLOGIES SRL
Romania

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ENDURANCE (Strategies and Services for Enhanced Disruption Resilience and Cooperation in Europe)

Reporting period: 2024-10-01 to 2026-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

ENDURANCE addresses the need to strengthen the resilience and continuity of essential services in Europe by moving beyond a narrow focus on the underlying critical assets.
The CER and NIS2 Directives provide an important framework for strengthening resilience across the European Union. However, the resilience of critical infrastructure and the continuity of essential services are still frequently addressed through fragmented and sector-specific approaches. ENDURANCE responds to this challenge by supporting Member State authorities and operators of critical infrastructure with the knowledge, methodologies, and capabilities required to manage disruptions more effectively and to support service continuity.
More specifically, ENDURANCE seeks to: (i) strengthen strategic cooperation and coordination among critical infrastructure stakeholders at all levels; (ii) develop datasets, registries, methodologies, technologies, and services at TRL 6–7 to support the secure sharing and federated processing of CER-relevant data, joint risk and resilience assessment, and large-scale stress testing of preparedness; and (iii) deliver a harmonised and operational strategy to support the continuity of interconnected essential services.
As the project entered its second year, the Consortium further intensified its efforts to maximise impact. A key milestone during this phase was the identification of the project’s most promising exploitable results, designated as Key Exploitable Assets (KEAs), which marked a shift towards a more focused and prioritised exploitation approach. Communication and dissemination activities also continued, with increased emphasis on synergies and engagement with the scientific community through channels such as Zenodo and relevant networking events. In parallel, impact assessment activities were further structured through the definition of initial baseline conditions to support measurement in the later stages of the project.
The Consortium also brings together policy makers and SSH experts whose knowledge, experience, and networks provide valuable input from external communities. Their contribution supports the alignment of project results with the needs of a broader user base and potential market uptake, while also helping to amplify impact through established networks.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

ENDURANCE established and validated the core strategic, technical, and organisational foundations required to strengthen the resilience of interconnected essential services across Europe. The consortium progressed from requirements definition and architectural design to TRL 5 system prototypes, supported by the structured implementation of pilot activities at European (MACRO), national/regional (MESO), and local (MICRO) levels.
The project approach—combining interoperable data infrastructures, a Trusted Data Space, Digital Twin, Resilience and Risk Intelligence, and stakeholder cooperation—was validated through the first pilot cycle and provides a solid basis for the next phase, which will focus on consolidation, scaling, and operational maturity.
Significant progress has been achieved across all core’s technological pillars:
• Digital Twins for Interconnected Essential Services: ENDURANCE delivered the first operational version of Primary Digital Twins representing interconnected essential services, including energy, water, health, telecommunications, and digital infrastructure. These Digital Twins provide georeferenced, multi-domain ecosystem views underpinned by a harmonised ontology aligned with the CER and NIS2 Directives. Validated capabilities include modelling of CI assets, services, and cross sector dependencies, multi-level visualization (asset, service, sector, ecosystem), integration of resilience indicators and dynamic filtering.
• Trusted EU CER Data Space was implemented and deployed using the DSP TRUE Connector. Core functionalities—dataset registration, catalogue management, identity and access management, secure contract negotiation, and initial real-time data exchange—are operational. The Data Space provides the basis for governed and interoperable data sharing across organisational and sectoral boundaries and is integrated with storage, auditing, and analytical services.
• Risk & Resilience Intelligence and Analytics: ENDURANCE established a Risk and Resilience Intelligence framework integrating multidimensional risk and resilience assessment, interdependency and cascading-effect analysis, and simulation-based “what-if” scenario evaluation. The framework operationalises the 8R Resilience Model through KPIs and composite metrics, including Cross-X indicators and an Ecosystem Resilience Index (ERI), enabling resilience assessment from asset to ecosystem level.
• Secure Data Exchange and Federated Processing: A first set of prototypes for secure data exchange and federated processing were delivered, enabling distributed analytics while preserving data sovereignty. A proportionality-based refinement of the security mechanisms has also been initiated for the next phase to ensure robustness while improving operational efficiency and scalability.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The federated data space enabling privacy-preserving collaboration relies on the establishment of a Trusted EU CER Data Space to support the secure, sovereign, and compliant exchange of sensitive infrastructure data. This supports data-driven decision-making while preserving compliance with GDPR, NIS2, CER requirements and protecting data sovereignty.
Advanced analytics for cascading effects and interdependency modelling provide tools for risk assessment, impact analysis, and the simulation of multi sector disruptions through digital twins. These capabilities support the anticipation and mitigation of systemic and cross sector risks.
Enhanced situational awareness and early warning capabilities provide real-time monitoring, anomaly detection, and alerts on resilience degradation based on multi-source data. Together, these capabilities support the preparedness and response capacity of critical infrastructure operators.
A standardised resilience assessment and knowledge framework supports the development of common data models, ontologies, and resilience metrics across sectors and countries, enabling harmonised benchmarking, policy alignment, and interoperability at EU level.
End users confirmed the value of the Data Space, Risk and Resilience Intelligence tools, Digital Twin-based visualisation, and workforce training for understanding interdependencies and cascading effects across sectors, as well as for improving the overall understanding of systemic resilience. They particularly emphasised the importance of flexible navigation between strategic ecosystem views and detailed operational views, role-based and context-aware filtering mechanisms, and clear interpretation of resilience indicators and analytics.
Users also highlighted the need for transparent and explainable analytics suitable for crisis management and regulatory contexts. This feedback reinforced ENDURANCE’s design choice to position AI and analytics as decision-support tools under human oversight, rather than as automated decision-making systems.
From a data perspective, stakeholders also endorsed the project’s progressive integration strategy, which starts with open and synthetic data and moves towards operational data only once governance, trust, and security conditions are fully in place.
The next phase of ENDURANCE will focus on consolidation, scaling, and operational readiness. Key priorities include: strengthening data ingestion pipelines and metadata governance, refining the ecosystem ontology towards more operational and temporal semantics, enhancing dynamic, multi-layer interdependency modelling and filtering, advancing resilience and risk assessment services towards TRL7 through large scale pilot validation.