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Expecting the unexpected and know how to respond

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - DARWIN (Expecting the unexpected and know how to respond)

Periodo di rendicontazione: 2016-06-01 al 2018-09-30

Compared to the past, recent disasters challenge society in terms of dealing with the unexpected, large scale, highly interconnected society and trans-boundary nature of events involving different countries, many private and public stakeholders and high expectations from the citizens. The DARWIN project addresses the improvement of responses to expected and unexpected crises affecting critical infrastructures and social structures. It covers the management of both man-made events (e.g. cyber-attacks) and natural events (e.g. severe weather). The overall objective and main result 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. All results of the project are public to facilitate their use. The target beneficiaries of DARWIN are crisis management actors and stakeholders responsible for public safety, such as critical infrastructures and service providers, as well as community groups.

The main objectives and results of the project were:
• Make resilience guidelines available for a particular critical infrastructure operator by developing and adapting the DARWIN resilience management guidelines (DRMG) to health care and air traffic management domains;
• Enable use of resilience guidelines in non-crisis situations supporting training and evaluation by delivering handouts to facilitate workshop, modules for a Master programme, material for lectures and proposing prototypes for simulation and serious games;
• Facilitate evolution of the guidelines proposing DARWIN Wiki as a knowledge management platform and by involving practitioners, that can evolve and integrate their needs and experiences;
• Establish a Community of Resilience and Crisis Practitioners (DCoP) by proposing highly interactive virtual and face to face activities to co-create and facilitate adaption and adoption of the DRMG. At peak the DCoP forum included 173 members from 25 countries;
• Build on lessons learned in the area of resilience by establishing a link between resilience capabilities and existing approaches and practices relevant for specific domains. This includes shared views from experts and practitioners from different domains;
• Carry out two pilot exercises that apply project results in two domains, the project performed more exercises than planned. Four pilot exercises were conducted addressing health care, air traffic management including cascade effects to other domains. Moreover, a small-scale evaluation was performed addressed highways. The evaluation actively involved 247 practitioners from 22 countries.
• Establish activities that will lead to project results being adapted to and later adopted by practitioners, workshops, webinars and presentations involving DCoP members have been performed. A white paper on resilience management was produced by five European projects with major contributions by the DARWIN consortium. Contribution to standardisation with knowledge from the project have been provided.
The conduction of a systematic literature review of journal articles with world-wide coverage and practitioners’ interviews produced a worldwide catalogue of relevant resilience concepts, approaches and evaluation methods including users' experiences and existing practices and tactics. Through seeking consensus among representatives from the Community of Practitioners (DCoP), the catalogue of resilience concepts served as a basis for a set of requirements for resilience management guidelines. An important result includes 124 requirements addressing the DRMG as a product, its development and evaluation.

The DARWIN Resilience Management Guidelines (DRMG) for critical infrastructures are developed around Capability Cards (CC) representing interventions to develop and enhance specific resilience management capabilities. The DRMGs are guiding principles to help or advice a certain organization in the creation, assessment or improvement of its own guidelines or procedures. They can be complementary to existing guidelines, procedures and practices in a certain organization, but they do not replace them. They include concrete examples of adaptation of the guidelines to health care and air traffic management as source of inspiration to facilitate use of the guidelines in different domains. The DARWIN Wiki supported the iterative and collaborative nature of the guidelines’ development. It contains a process to adapt the guidelines to specific infrastructure has been created and used by organizations representing two critical infrastructures health care and air traffic management. The process is documented in detail so it can be used as inspiration for other critical infrastructures.

The guidelines are made available in different formats to facilitate use, maintenance and evolution, and to avoid that they become "dust collectors" on a shelf. The project implemented existing technology and methods in innovative ways in the context of resilience management, such as a Knowledge Management platform based on Semantic MediaWiki to facilitate the distributed development of and access to the guidelines, simulation and serious gaming for training purposes as well as for validation of the guidelines. These innovations enable the adoption of dynamic and user-friendly guidelines by potential users and establish knowledge about how organizations can implement the guidelines to improve resilience.

Evaluation activities included pilot exercises, DCoP workshops and small-scale evaluations actively involved directly 247 practitioners from 22 countries. A quantitative and qualitative approach produced prioritized recommendations for the improvement of the guidelines, as well as suggestions from practitioners to improve their usability and implementation.

During the DARWIN project there has been an active facilitation between the project partners and the DARWIN Community of Practitioners (DCoP). The DCoP have evolved throughout the project, starting as a small target group of experts to continuously increase in numbers covering a broad spectrum of Critical Infrastructures and varying backgrounds of expertise, from front end operators to international policy makers. The DCoP has throughout the project consisted of over 170 members from 25 countries across the world. This has been such valuable feedback that the DARWIN project sees the DCoP as co-creators to the DRMG. The DCoP has also aided in identifying early adopters of the project results.

The content of all DARWIN work benefits from three DCoP workshops and webinars, focused workshops, focus group interviews, and communication in conferences, conference proceedings and journal articles.
The concept of resilience has been used in a wide variety of ways in academia and in the field of practice. The project operationalised resilience concepts through the development of evolving DARWIN resilience Management Guidelines evaluated in four pilots exercises. The evaluation activities provide evidence on DRMG complement to risk management, addressing real and practical needs and more effective resilience management. Innovative tools accompanying the guidelines such as DRMG Wiki, simulation, serious games and training packages enable adoption. We have done a big step towards bringing essential resilience concepts closer to practice.
Screenshot of simulation tool
Screenshot of Virtual Reality mini-game
DARWIN Wiki concept: development and access
Screenshot of DARWIN Wiki homepage
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