This workshop aims at bringing together security experts from different fields and discuss about novel concepts and approaches to tackle current issues in CI protection. In this context, we want to look at the potential cascading effects an incident within a CI might have on dependent infrastructures, economy as well as the people living in a metropolitan area. Besides results from theoretical work, we would also encourage the presentation of technological solutions (e.g., prototypes) implementing those methodologies as well as use case scenarios and empirical studies, which provide insights in real-life applications and the occurring problems.
SUNRISE
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of the continuity of vital services and has shown the need to work together for the common good. It has proven that a pandemic is not only a health crisis that disrupts Critical Infrastructures (CIs) but highlights the extremely important link between the resilience of these CIs and our societies. The economic crisis caused by the pandemic also provides a unique opportunity to jointly ‘build back better’ with the focus on sustainability and green recovery.
SUNRISE facilitates active collaboration of CIs across Europe to share best practices and jointly tackle future pandemics. Therefore, SUNRISE aims to identify pandemic-specific vital services and CIs, their dependencies, risks, cascading effects, and effective measures to tackle them at European level. This will be done by developing a comprehensive strategy and four innovative tools ensuring greater availability, reliability, security, robustness, trustworthiness, cost-effectiveness, climate-friendliness, and continuity of pandemic-specific vital services in Europe.
MERCURIUS
A resilient supply of the population with fast moving consumer goods (FMCG), such as hygiene products, household products, cosmetics or even food, is an important goal, especially in times of crisis. However, the increasing interdependencies and simultaneous lack of transparency in the FMCG value chains are creating ever greater complexity. As a result, risks are not recognized at all or recognized too late, which enormously limits the scope for action for state actors (e.g., ministries) but also interest groups; out-of-stock situations, bullwhip effects, ad hoc reactions or similar are the result. Thus, the identification of critical nodes and supply channels to support objective decisions in times of crisis is of central importance.
The aim of the MERCURIUS project is to create a concept for systemic risk and resilience monitoring that provides a holistic overview of the FMCG supply system on a national and transnational level. Through a combination of static and dynamic analyses, potential vulnerabilities in the value chains can be identified and the effects of disruptions can be simulated. In this way, the vulnerability of the population at different levels (municipality, state or federal government) is analyzed, taking into account social and demographic aspects as well as irrational actions (e.g., panic buying). Based on these simulation results, different resilience factors for FMCG supply can be defined; at the same time, action strategies and their effectiveness can be evaluated in relation to these resilience factors.