RESISTAND

Increasing disaster resilience by standardisation of technologies and services

Challenge

ResiStand is a two-year project that aims to identify new ways to improve the crisis management and disaster resilience capabilities of the European Union and individual Member States through standardisation. Whilst standardisation is a powerful tool with the potential to maximise technical, procedural, operational and semantic interoperability, there is a need to overcome apathy and limited participation from stakeholders.

ResiStand contributes to an improved disaster resilience by identifying and analysing the drivers, constraints and expectations of three main stakeholder communities: standardisation organisations, end users and suppliers, consisting of researchers, industry and SMEs.

Additionally, ResiStand implements a pre-standardisation process that supports the development of standards. Specific objectives are:

  • to propose new standardisation activities that can advance and improve disaster resilience
  • to provide a better understanding of the potential of standardisation as a tool for improving disaster resilience
  • to present a new, sustainable process for better and faster capitalizing on the potential of standardisation.

Approach

RESISTAND outcomes will be a roadmap for future standardisation activities, as well as a sustainable process to improve future standardisation.

RINA was deeply involved in the first year of the project by looking at end users and suppliers needs, trying to identify which are the main emergency issues that require, according to them, a standardization approach.

This goal will be achieved through the creation of the ResiStand Roadmap and ResiStand Process to support stakeholders in the development of standards.

In this framework we lead the activities related to the consolidation, analysis and updating of the standardization needs of the end user community. To this aim, we organized several workshops, securing the presence of multiple and relevant end users. The outcome of this work are publicly available at this link: http://resistand.eu/content/d33-report-end-user-standardisation-demands.

In parallel we lead the activities related to the identification of standardization opportunities on the basis of a desk-search of most relevant (in the last years) EU R&D projects and workshops outcomes. In the selection of relevant projects, we executed a structured method, starting from keyword in the Cordis and EDA database.

We secured a wide participation to the workshops and made sure that criteria such as geographic distribution, type of organization (e.g. industry vs. research) and expertise were balanced. The outcome of this work are publicly available at: http://resistand.eu/content/d44-summary-report-new-standardisation-activities.

Finally we contribute to the RESISTAND Taxonomy definition and to the prioritization of the gaps identified in the standardization activity.

Conclusion

RESISTAND is a great opportunity for us, since it allows working in the field of Disaster Resilience by looking at end-users needs, industry demand and the standardization processes. This opportunity has been pursued by leading the activities related to the identification of standardization needs (from end-users) and the identification of standardization opportunities (from S/T providers), through workshops, interviews and agreement with end-users organization, S/T providers and standardization bodies. This allowed a direct and straightforward contact with end-users and suppliers, being potential customers in this sector.

Moreover, the work carried out in RESISTAND and the opportunities to get in contact with end-users and supplier are well aligned with the objectives of a recently newly launched activity within RINA: the creation of a transversal Working Group (WG) dealing with the topic of RESILIENCE and its applications to Disaster Resilience and Critical Infrastructure Resilience. The WG, transversal to the company business units and markets, has the main objectives of mapping future trends in the area of Disaster Resilience so that to understand potential service offering leveraging on the company expertise, outcomes of R&D projects and clients’ needs/demand.

As such the WG has created a consensual view on the topic of disaster resilience, that has been formulated in a recent multi-business company brochure dealing with Disaster Resilience.

Clemente Fuggini