Amidst an increasingly interconnected and complex world, the provision of essential services remains crucial for the well-being of European citizens and the smooth functioning of the internal market. Yet, the ever-evolving landscape of risks, ranging from cyber threats, physical attacks, and human errors to natural disasters, demands a proactive and collaborative, pan-European approach to ensuring disruption resilience. Therefore, ENDURANCE is driven by the critical need to fortify Europe’s essential services against potential disruptions, transcending the sole focus on the underlaying critical assets. Recognizing the significance of the CER and NIS2 Directives in setting the groundwork for resilience and, in parallel, the current silo approach to the Critical Infrastructure (CI) resilience and the business continuity of essential services they provide, we will assist the CI authorities across the EU in fully grasping and harmoniously implementing both directives. By comprehensively understanding and preparing for the demands of these legislative measures (and their national implementations), we aim to empower the EU MS authorities and CI operators with the know-how, methodologies, services, and strategies needed to navigate the complexities of disruption resilience effectively. With a team of 9 excellent research, technology, and business developing organisations (all with vast experience in INFRA projects), and with 7 EU MS authorities and 6 CI operators representing 6 critical sectors and 4 EU MS, ENDURANCE will: (i) Enhance strategic cooperation and collaboration among the CI stakeholders at all levels. (ii) Develop datasets, registries, methodologies, technologies, and services (at TRL6-7) for secure sharing and federated processing of CER-relevant data, joint assessment of relevant risks and resilience, and large-scale stress-testing of preparedness. (iii) Provide harmonised and pragmatic strategy for the continuity of the interconnected essential services.

As (peri-)urban areas become increasingly digital, interconnected, and complex, alongside growing threats such as climate change, natural disasters, or cyber-attacks, there is an urgent need to enhance the resilience and security of critical infrastructures (CIs) and the essential services they support. ECHO addresses these challenges by creating a multi-level Resilience Ecosystem that unites CI operators, Emergency Service Providers (ESPs), local/regional authorities (AUTs), and emergency service providers (EMPs) to co-create innovative tools, services, and strategies, for enhanced (urban) resilience planning and management. ECHO develops an EU-sovereign Knowledge Hub and a suite of interoperable, modular, and cost-effective services, accessible via a centralized Platform. These include tools for threat forecasting, risk assessment, situational awareness, decision support, resilience plan evaluation, and scenario-based simulations, tailored to address diverse multi-hazard threats. Our Information Sharing Protocol ensures cost-effective resource pooling and collaboration, helping smaller municipalities overcome budget constraints. By using cutting-edge technologies such as Generative AI, we enable advanced modelling, forecasting, and decision-making while ensuring transparency and data security. ECHO operates through 4 pilot sites in Slovenia, Italy, Spain, and the cross-border Italy-Slovenia region, addressing multiple hazards (floods, landslides, drought, earthquakes, wildfires, infrastructure failures, cyber-attacks) and engage diverse stakeholders (AUTs, ESPs, EMPs) to test and validate our solutions in relevant settings, ensuring scalability and adaptability across Europe. Through comprehensive impact-generation activities, ECHO promotes best practices, empowering stakeholders of all sizes to strengthen the resilience of interconnected systems, enhancing the security and wellbeing of European citizens and communities.

ARIEN proposes the execution of a comprehensive workplan that thoroughly addresses the call topic aligned to the 2021-2025 EU Drugs Action Plan (DAP) achieved through a holistic innovation action that builds a real-time intelligence picture illegal drug production and trafficking incidence across the EU bolstered by AI-driven tools to understand, detect, analyse and track the entire drugs trafficking chain, its financial flows and the role of black-markets in the global darknet and their relationships with of social media. ARIEN builds on a strong platform of multi-disciplinary research, following a co-creation approach, across the criminological, societal, and legislative landscapes that will make recommendations for harmonization and drive an agenda for the development of modular solutions embedding modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and best practices for international cooperation in data-rich environments in a legally and ethically compliant manner. Aiming at improving the investigative capability of LEAs on illegal drugs production and trafficking, ARIEN will leverage on innovative AI techniques to monitor online illicit drugs markets and collecting precious information on physical drug-dealing hotspots through social media. Additional layers of analysis, supported by explainable AI (XAI) methods, will provide actionable knowledge on modus operandi and emerging threats and trends both on drugs and drug-related organized crime networks through integrations with criminal records data and detection of online activities. Moreover, ARIEN will promote effective strategies on international cooperation among EU and non-EU LEAs, Customs and Border Guards Authorities and policy makers to enhance investigative activities against criminal groups, capitalising on effective AI techniques.

Europe is facing unprecedented challenges, such as the health, migration, economic, climate, energy, and political crises, leading to a sharp increase in emergency public spending and relaxation of due diligence checks. This has resulted in a rise in corruption and fraudulent activities, which have significant negative impacts on the European economy, society, environment, and democracy. Despite emerging technology’s potential to become a powerful tool in the fight against corruption and fraud, the public sector has been slow to adopt digitalization, resulting in data NOT being shared, harmonized, or properly analysed, making evidence-based decision-making almost impossible. Governments are slowly adopting new approaches to ensure a more data-driven, transparent, and accountable public governance, but several fundamental data-related issues remain unresolved. With a team of 9 excellent research institutions and universities, 12 technology, business, and standards, developing companies, 7 public end users, and 3 domain-relevant, industry-exposed NGOs, CEDAR will: (1) Identify, collect, fuse, harmonise, and protect complex data sources to generate and share 10+ high-quality, high-value datasets relevant for a more transparent and accountable public governance in Europe. (2) Develop interoperable and secure connectors and APIs to utilise and enrich 6+ Common European Data Spaces. (3) Develop innovative and scalable technologies for effective big data management and Machine Learning (ML) operations. (4) Deliver robust big data analytics and ML to facilitate human-centric and evidence-based decision-making in public administration. (4) Validate the new datasets and technologies (TRL5) in the context of fighting corruption, thus aligning with the EU strategic priorities: digitalisation, economy, democracy. (5) Actively promote results across Europe to ensure their adoption and longevity, and to generate positive, direct, tangible, and immediate impacts.

ORION will (a) improve coordination between border, customs and security controls through the development of novel, ground-breaking technologies to streamline processes and enhance communication between various control points; (b) optimize resource allocation for border checks in a dynamic manner, reducing wait times and hassle for travellers while maintaining high security standards; (c) enhance threat detection capabilities of border authorities in challenging operational environments such as on roll-on-roll-off ferries where vehicles and passengers are in continuous movement; (d) enforce interoperability with existing databases and tools and legacy systems used by different EU MSs; (e) improve energy efficiency and reduce the environmental impact of the border passing operations minimizing the waiting queues and reducing traffic congestion in these border crossings points and (f) ensure strong ethical and legal compliance of the developed technologies in order to protect travellers’ personal data. Its innovative framework will be demonstrated in 4 diverse yet complementary use cases, i.e., targeting passenger and vehicle verification during (a) embarkment and (b) disembarkment from roll-on-roll-off (Ro-Ro) ferries, (c) enhanced risk assessment and resource allocation at land border check points and (d) improved security for passengers travelling by train.