a scalable and robust system

A potential failure of critical infrastructures such as, pipelines, energy lines, transportation routes, etc., can occur at any point and at any unexpected moment across their extended grid spread over wide geographic areas.

These 'Widezones' aim primarily to the strengthening of the infrastructure's robustness by extending in a trans- boundary fashion for the transport of materials necessary on a daily basis. Failures at critical points (functions, equipment, and controls) can compromise the integrity of the involved installations and the security of energy and resources supply, with adverse socio-economic effects to citizens, customers and the environment (major accidents). Shortcomings in the control of hazards inherent to the safe performance of the infrastructures are strongly linked with the effective implementation and functioning of a Safety Management System (SMS) including appropriate safety and security provisions, emergency planning and other proactive measures such as surveillance, from detection to alert.

Critical infrastructure may spread over large areas covering wide geographic zones. Wide-area infrastructures such as electricity try to strengthen their resilience by expanding their grid trans-boundary or the need for oil trans-boundary transport by pipeline instead of ships are fine examples where the need to manage their surveillance operations becomes a real challenge. The fact that those infrastructures are often controlled by several stakeholders in a consortium (oil gas, electricity, water, highways) makes the challenge even greater and more complex to manage.

ZONeSEC aims to address the needs of Widezones surveillance by defining a new European-wide framework, which will extend beyond a sole technical proposition. Driven by the need to yield a holistic and uniform approach, ZONeSEC redefines the issue of security of Widezones by taking into consideration issues pertaining to costs, complexity, vulnerability, societal acceptance and ethics.

Objetives

The proposed solutions in ZONeSEC aim at benefiting the European countries for transnational applications. Widezone infrastructure is shared across countries in Europe and thus it is imperative that ZONeSEC will create a robust and more importantly a scalable system which provides the same level of overview and situation awareness across all involved parties from different countries. ZONeSEC will achieve this by:

  • Assessing the AS-IS situation, identifying the existing gaps and provide solid solutions to them.
  • Driving standardization of proposed systems and prototypes.
  • Defining a common ground for the surveillance of the Widezones in different countries and covering diverse application domains for surveillance and security.
  • Establishing a surveillance system of systems that will interoperate delivering flow of information and knowledge for a large number and type of surveillance communities across countries.
  • Test and evaluate its capabilities in a transnational pilot application covering the needs of gas supplies with pipelines shared across PanEuropean countries.

Improving interoperability is one of the main targets of the project:

  • 1. Interoperable and Cooperative ZONeSEC solutions to facilitate the coordination of Widezones surveillance activities.
  • 2. Interoperability of the ZONeSEC platform at a national level.
  • 3. Interoperability at a cross-border level.

Main Issues og ACCIONA in the Project

  • Acciona as end-user provides one of the pilots of the project. In particular, Acciona provides a highway as a Widezone in order to deploy the solutions developed inside the project.
  • Support to develop the technical and functional requirements of ACCIONA´s use case in the framework of the ZONeSEC platform.
  • Installation of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) in the pilot directed to monitor intrusions in protected areas of the highway.
  • Development of the mechanisms to send the gathered data by the WSN to the ZONeSEC platform.

Duration

01/12/2014-30/11/2018 (48 months)

Consortium

  • EXODUS S.A. - Greece
  • DIGINEXT - France
  • IK4-TEKNIKER - Spain
  • ATOS - Spain
  • TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITÄT DRESDEN - Germany
  • INSITITUTO DI SOCIOLOGIA INTERNAZIONALE DI GORIZIA - Italy
  • AIRBUS - Germany
  • UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON - UK
  • INSTITUTE OF COMMUNICATION AND COMPUTER SYSTEMS - Greece
  • CRISISPLAN BV - Netherlands
  • ADITESS LTD. - Cyprus
  • GAP ANALYSIS - Greece
  • SILIXA - UK
  • THALES RESEARCH & TECHNOLOGY - France
  • TELESTO TECHNOLOGIES PLIROFORIKIS KAI EPIKOINONION EPE - Greece
  • ATTIKES DIADROMES - Greece
  • AQUASERV - Romania
  • GASUNIE - Netherlands
  • ACCIONA Infraestructuras S.A. - Spain

Web page

www.zonesec.eu

Questionnaire

The European FP7 project ZONeSEC (Towards an EU framework for the security of widezones -www.zonesec.eu) is conducting a survey on the perception and acceptance of monitoring/control technologies in different contexts, focusing mostly on few identified monitoring tools and systems for surveillance and maintenance of public assets.

The survey is aimed at embedding insights and feedbacks from citizens within the project architecture. We kindly invite you to participate to the survey following this link:

In English language

Thank you very much for your collaboration!