A great TeamAware first year for the Resilience Advisors Network and an increasing focus on the project demonstrations

It’s been a busy TeamAware start for the RAN Team. With the project now in full flow. At the end of last year, we concluded our work helping to define and determine the system requirements and specifications based on the first responder needs, use-cases and operational scenarios. This resulted in submission of a comprehensive report investigating “Conceptual Analysis and System Requirements”. The report will be published as soon as its signed-off by our Project Officer.

No time to relax after that though as we’ve had two key activities to oversee from the beginning of this year.

Security Arrangements

The first has been to reinforce and operationalise the necessary Security arrangements for partners and deliverables. Many of the technologies being developed within the project are leading and cutting edge. The companies involved are understandably sensitive about their intellectual property and how it gets transmitted to a broader audience. All are fully committed to supporting the projects aims and to implementing innovative solutions so the process is supported by all partners.

We’ve recently appointed a new team member, Chris Singer, to lead the Security Advisory Board (SAB) and wish him luck with the work to come. He’s already reviewed 12 draft deliverables and worked with our coordinators to address some small challenges so, truly a baptism of fire!

Demonstrations

Preparation for the Interim demonstration (our Work Package 13) is well underway supported by a team introduced to the consortium last month:

Plans are now well underway for a week-long event in November in Turkey making use of the unrivalled facilities of Havelsan, Ankara. The mid-term demonstrations will focus on the individual components of project which will be tested through two days of ‘tabletop demonstrations’ followed by the opportunity for a small number of “integration trials” where solution providers will test their products in the developing TeamAware environment.

Tabletop demonstration are planned to be used through a test-bed type scenarios where each element will be stressed in a controlled environment to demonstrate their current state of development. The demonstration environment will reflect the conditions / scenario required to demonstrate the system requirements (for example if the component is required to work in smoke filled environments, an artificial smoke filled environment will be encountered).

Some elements of functionality and connectivity will still be under development and, as such, some technical ‘workarounds’ may be expected and allowed for in the demonstrations.

The results of the mid-term demonstration and evaluation will feed back into the development of the component solutions. Based on the evaluation results the solutions will be further improved, finalised and ready for the much larger and comprehensive final demonstration and evaluation towards the end of the project.

We’re now working hard on first drafts of the demonstration plans, training handbooks and the evaluation process which form a separate set of deliverables later this year. At the heart of this of course are the needs and opinions of the end-user group which covers disciplines across fire & rescue, emergency medical and policing and security. A tough but vital group of stakeholders!

Just to conclude, we’re immensely grateful for the support of the technical coordinator, Çağlar Akman and his team at HAVELSAN as well as the project coordinator, Carmen Oana and her team from SIMAVI. TeamAware is a highly complex project with many technical, user and research stakeholders, all from very diverse backgrounds. The project performing as a single team in the cohesive manner it currently is, is largely down to their vision and hard work.