Standardisation of situational awareness systems to strengthen operations in civil protection

The workshop SAYO, organized by the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), in collaboration with ARTTIC took place on 29-30 November 2018 in Luxembourg city.

SAYSO project

LIST is a partner of the H2020 project “Standardisation of situational awareness systems to strengthen operations in civil protection” (SAYSO). Its mission is to define the reference architecture and specifications for future innovative European cost‐effective and user‐friendly situational awareness tools that fulfil end-user requirements and can be used across different organisations, hierarchical levels and national borders.

SAYSO workshop

In this context, the objective of the workshop was to explore how to manage cross-border civil protection events and to study different state-of the art and emerging technologies in this domain. Cross-border aspects are challenging not least due to language, legal and structural differences, but also the existence of many different national and international standards for the implied stakeholders. Luxembourg, which is surrounded by three European member states (France, Germany and Belgium), and having a unique geographical nature, was an ideal place to organise this workshop.

In order to inform the participants who are experts on cross-border communication, satellite technologies and remote sensing, speakers were invited to present the state of the art in these technologies. Carlos Lopez from LIST showed remote sensing technologies and experts from emergency.lu and SES gave insights into modern satellite communications for emergency scenarios. Fritz Steinhäusler from International Security Competence Centre (ISCC - Austria) presented the current status of situational aware systems for multiple stakeholders.

As a main result, the workshop defined research areas and topics for exploring the cross-border aspects of specific technologies for the domain of situational awareness systems, such as the before-mentioned satellite technologies, but also augmented/virtual reality and others.

> For any further information on this topic, contact Dr Roderick Mc Call via email.