Satways Ltd. has been selected by the Public Power Corporation SA (PPC) to provide its ENGAGE CSIM (Converged Security Information Management) hw & protocol agnostic platform to supervise all PPC sites/facilities across Greece. ENGAGE CSIM, will be installed at the PPC Central Control Center and will be managing incidents/events generated by security, fire protection, IoT automation, telecom and public safety systems.

Our IoT Product Manager Mr. Konstantinos Kandakis, as a proud member of our Smart Cities team, participated as a speaker in the training seminar held at the University of West Attica on the subject of “Smart Buildings”, presenting the new Trends and Technologies to the new generation of engineers.

Satways Ltd. has been selected by the Municipality of Skopelos to install its ENGAGE AFD (Automatic Fire Detection) system that efficiently detect forest fire threats in 3 critical areas and manage the related events on an advanced Incident Management & Collaboration Platform operated by the Municipality Civil Protection Office.

Well-maintained roads make a crucial contribution to the economic development and growth of a region and bring important social benefits to all citizens. Road maintenance is responsible for keeping our roads safe and enabling efficient transport of people and goods. Although the need for maintenance is widely recognized, it is still not getting adequately done due to rising costs. Many countries spend just 20–50 percent of what is needed for the maintenance of their road network. The rising costs lead to postponing of maintenance works leading to negative feedback loops that increase the overall budget for keeping the roads up to the standard. The high maintenance costs are rising due to multiple parameters including more demand for transportation due to increasing e-commerce and mobility, climate change, the need for additional safety measurements, increasing material cost etc. To solve to the above challenge of road maintenance SATWATS has joined the HERON project.

HERON will result in an integrated automated system that performs maintenance and upgrading roadworks such as sealing cracks, patching potholes, painting markings, etc. The system will also support the pre/post-intervention phase by aiding visual inspections and by dispensing/removing traffic cones in an automated manner. The project goal is to improve occupational safety and health among road workers, by reducing fatalities due to accidents and exposure to toxic fumes. It also aims to reduce traffic disruptions due to maintenance works and decrease the costs for carrying out these works.

The HERON integrated system will include a range of components, notable among these are:

• an autonomous ground robotic vehicle supported by autonomous drones
• robotic equipment, including sensors and actuators (e.g., tools for cut and fill, surface material placement and compaction, modular components installation, and laser scanners for 3D mapping).
• augmented reality (AR) visualization tools that provide a detailed view of surface defects and markings.
• artificial intelligence/AI-based toolkits for optimally coordinating maintenance workflows and processing distributed data coming from different sensors

The consortium consists of companies and organizations with diverse profiles, forming a cross-disciplinary team capable to bring the project into reality:

• Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (Greece) – Project Coordinator
• Acciona Construccion (Spain)
• Olympia Odos Operation SA (Greece)
• Universite Gustave Eiffel (France)
• Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule Zuerich (Switzerland)
• Robotnik Automation (Spain)
• Confederation of Organisations in Road Transport Enforcement (Belgium)
• Satways - Proionta Kai Ypiresies Tilematikis Diktyakon Kai Tilepikinoniakon Efarmogon Etairia Periorismenis Efthinis Epe (Greece)
• Risa Sicherheitsanalysen (Germany)
• Innov-Acts Limited (Cyprus)
• Ainoouchaou Pliroforiki Ae (Greece)
• Resilience Guard (Switzerland)

In the project Satways will develop the Common Operation Picture and Augmented Reality tools to elevate the decision-making capabilities of road operators on planning, monitoring and operation levels. A kick-off meeting for this 4-year project was organized online in June 2021, and regular updates will be posted on the project website at: https://www.heron-h2020.eu/ and on our news section.

In the new security landscape of Europe, ground segments increasingly appear as potential “new targets” for “new threats”, especially the hybrid ones (e.g. cyber-physical). A physical/cyber-attack to their installations or communication networks, respectively, would cause debilitating impact on public safety and security of European citizens and affect also other European critical infrastructure.

To address this challenge, an EU-funded Project entitled: “Safety and Security Standards of Space Systems, ground Segments and Satellite data assets, via prevention, detection, response and mitigation of physical and cyber threats – 7SHIELD” has launched on September 1st, 2020 and received €8.6Μ under the Horizon 2020 program. 22 partners from 12 countries bring together a unique combination of research, technical, demonstration and innovation skills and expertise necessary to ensure the successful accomplishment of the 7SHIELD project.

7SHIELD addresses the security and the resilience of EU Ground Segments of Space Systems and aims at providing a holistic framework enable to confront complex threats by covering all the macrostages of crisis management, namely pre-crisis, crisis and post-crises phases. Specifically, the early warning mechanism estimates the level of risk before the occurrence of a cyber or physical attack.

The expected result will be an integrated yet flexible and adaptable framework enabling the deployment of innovative services for cyber-physical protection of ground segments, such as e-fences, passive radars and laser technologies, multimedia AI technologies from CCTV cameras and UAVs, that

• Enhance their protection capabilities
• Integrate or interoperate with existing protection solutions already deployed at their installations, EU, national and other systems

The framework will be open and will integrate advanced state-of-the-art technologies for data integration, processing, and analytics, machine learning and recommendation systems, data visualization and dashboards, data security and cyber threat protection and cyber-attack detection. The technological solution is co-designed with first responders’ teams and contributes to policy making, standardisation and new guidelines for contingency planning. Social awareness is analysed and automatic messages are generated to the public. The project will be evaluated and demonstrated in five installations of space ground segments through the performance of corresponding pilot use case scenarios.

In 7SHIELD, SATWAYS will lead the delivery of the Risk Assessment tools in pre-crisis phase by offering and adapting its Climate Change/Natural Hazards Impact Analysis Software which is based in a holistic risk assessment framework and methodology applied in the CIRP tool that has been developed in the framework of the EU-CIRCLE project. Furthermore, SATWAYS will lead the activities of the development of a unified User Interface for monitoring and responding to combined physical and cyber threats. The Command & Control (C2) room will host the 7SHIELD C2 software that integrates all physical and cyber security sensors, raw and fused data and a decision support tools, through standardised interfaces, generating an enhanced operational picture and situation awareness, to assist operators in the decision-making process at all levels of coordination. The system will be based on a highly modular and reconfigurable S/W platform and a reliable, distributed Event Driven architecture which will support the comprehensive physical security, incident control and resource dispatching offering an unmatched combination of speed, reliability, and features adaptive to highly complex communication environments.

Although fires are part of the natural functioning of ecosystems, some of them pose a significant threat. For example, the wildfires that occurred in Portugal in 2017 had big impacts, including the loss of 117 human lives. There were also losses of private and public property, including buildings and industrial infrastructures, energy network infrastructure, roads, telecommunications, forestry and agricultural resources.

Current approaches involve high-cost suppression operations along with controversial policies that lead to inefficient risk management and severe damage. Coordinated by Dr. Domingos Xavier Viegas from the University of Coimbra (Portugal), FirEUrisk aims to change this approach by reducing current fire risk conditions through an adequate assessment that identifies the drivers of vulnerability, and by adapting fire management strategies to expected climate and socio-economic changes. The strategy will also include plans to guide the response to the emergency as well as studies of the impacts after it to facilitate recovery.

“FirEUrisk is a very ambitious project corresponding to a very demanding and competitive call that requested a research and innovation project dealing with all aspects of forest fires management in an integrated way. It addresses the problem of reducing the risk of extreme wildfires especially for the population by learning lessons from the past but having in mind what the future changes in the climate and socio-economic activities may bring to the entire Europe,” Viegas says

The multidisciplinary team, that includes researchers, practitioners, policymakers and citizens, will study the vulnerability and resilience of communities and countries to wildfire including the impact of policies on land use and how socio-economic issues and human activity influence vulnerability. This will allow the creation of regional planning approaches to increase the resilience and safety of local communities, enhancing nature-based solutions, that will be tested in pilot sites and demonstration areas in Northern, Central and Mediterranean Europe.

The new approach will include innovative technologies, tools, training materials, guidelines and policy recommendations to improve wildfire management and reduce the most damaging effects of wildfires.

Satways main role in the project is to design and develop a cooperative platform to enable access and exchange of data, codes, models and knowledge. This platform will be first developed and used within the project (internal cooperative platform) and then it will be exploited (public open platform) to disseminate results externally to Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre (DRMKC). The platform will comprise a data portal, a code repository and a wiki to exchange data, methods and models, and knowledge. The inclusion of a wiki in the platform will provide a unique knowledge base including information and documentation on data, models and services. Ultimately, this will enhance the knowledge sharing potential for end-users. The data portal will include a dynamic mapping capability to visualise the data. The open platform will be tailored to meet the different needs of the end-users and follow the needs and requests of various stakeholders (fire service, forest service, civil protection, planners, authorities, policymakers etc.).