From May 12 to May 14, 2014, representatives from the security & defence industry, from research and academia, SMEs, end-users and several European institutions, from 13 EU member states and 2 associated countries, came together in Madrid to kick off the project. With 33.4€ million funding from the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme, DRIVER is the largest crisis management research & innovation project in Europe, if not the world, for the foreseeable future.

Over the next four and a half years, the consortium will work on the development of a pan-European test-bed of virtually connected exercise facilities and crisis laboratories where users, providers, researchers, policy makers and citizens can work jointly and iteratively on new approaches and solutions to emerging crisis management issues. This will facilitate capability development through the provision of appropriate methodologies and infrastructures. The DRIVER Test-bed will help to develop a portfolio of crisis management tools to strengthen crisis management capabilities at member state and EU level.

The two key dimensions of DRIVER – the Test-bed and the Portfolio of Tools - are complemented by a third dimension: sharing a common understanding of crisis management across Europe. Crisis management practitioners, policy makers, technology suppliers and the citizenry will be invited to join the DRIVER Community. This constantly evolving Community will enable an intensive collaboration with and between crisis management stakeholders concerned by societal and technological innovation in CM and its up-take. The development of the DRIVER Portfolio of tools and the set-up of European test-bed facilities will produce a set of new capabilities for more effective European crisis management. The long-term sustainability of the test-bed, processes and tools will enhance European resilience and crisis management capabilities beyond the duration of the project. The project will be coordinated by European IT services leader Atos with technical and scientific support from the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Technological Trend Analysis (INT).

Read the official press release here.