Speaker: Adam Widera

Abstract: The scale and pace of crises pose enormous challenges for the crisis management (CM) community, with new threats emerging all the time. An already complex field must strive to integrate new technologies and methods; cope with a rapidly changing infrastructure; understand evolving risks; be effective across cultural, administrative and national boundaries as well as engage with populations to enhance their resilience. In this context, crisis management innovation must be capable of meeting these multifaceted challenges and delivering solutions that are modular, flexible and adaptable.

The aim of the EU-funded DRIVER+ project, which concluded in June 2020 and was labelled by the Research Executive Agency (REA) of the EC a “success story”, has been to accelerate capability development and crisis management innovation by delivering these main outputs to the European crisis management community:

• The pan-European Test-bed consisting of the Trial Guidance Methodology (TGM), a Trial Guidance Tool (TGT) supporting the TGM application as well as an appropriate Test-bed Technical Infrastructure (TTI) enabling the simulation of a crisis environment including the connection of the innovative solutions and the respective legacy systems;
• The Portfolio of Solutions (PoS) covering innovative crisis management solutions at different technology readiness levels, according to a well-structured taxonomy of crisis management functions and gaps.
• The Crisis Management Innovation Network Europe (CMINE) enhancing the shared understanding of crisis management in Europe.

After presenting those three key DRIVER+ outputs and sharing several insights from the project, one out of the five trials will be briefly presented. The Trial was held in The Hague, Netherlands, and it covered a flood scenario triggering a mass evacuation in the affected region. One of the assessed solutions, a multi-method simulation environment, was also developed at the ERCIS Competence Center Crisis Management.

Short Bio: Adam is the managing director of the ERCIS Competence Center for Crisis Management working at the research group Information Systems & Supply Chain Management. He was the coordinator of the DRIVER+ project at the University of Muenster. He is working in the areas of modeling, simulation and performance measurement in humanitarian logistics as well as the design and evaluation of information systems for humanitarians.