Flooding represents the most-occurring and deadliest threats worldwide among natural disasters. Consequently, new technologies are constantly developed to improve response capacities in crisis management. The remaining challenge for practitioner organizations is not only to identify the best solution to their individual demands, but also to test and evaluate its benefit in a realistic environment before the disaster strikes. To bridge the gap between theoretic potential and actual integration into practice, the EU-funded project DRIVER+ has designed a methodical and technical environment to assess innovation in a realistic but non-operational setup through trials. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) interdisciplinary merged mature technical developments into the “Airborne and terrestrial situational awareness” system and applied it in a DRIVER+ Trial to promote a sustainable and demand-oriented R&D. Experienced practitioners assessed the added value of its modules “KeepOperational” and “ZKI” in the context of large-scale flooding in urban areas. The solution aimed at providing contextual route planning in police operations and extending situational awareness based on information derived through aerial image processing. The user feedback and systematically collected data through the DRIVER + Test-bed approved that DLR’s system could improve transport planning and situational awareness across organizations. However, the results show a special need to consider, for example, cross-domain data-fusion techniques to provide essential 3D geo-information to effectively support specific response tasks during flooding.

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A well working transportation infrastructure is crucial for modern societies and the mobility of people. The general public relies on a sound infrastructure to fulfill their increasing and individual mobility needs. This means a wide range of transport necessities-e.g. daily way to work and daily (consumer, service) needs. In the event of a crisis, e.g. caused by a natural hazard, the transport infrastructure becomes vital for different reasons. The people have to be evacuated or rescued from the affected area. Furthermore, relief aid and supplies, as well as rescue forces do require unimpaired access to the crisis area. Natural disasters, like an earthquake or a flooding, are disturbing the transport infrastructure negatively. Cascading consequences are, for example, impassable roads, disturbed railway connections and a reduced transport capacity of persons and goods. To develop evacuation strategies, to plan logistics operations of emergency forces in the affected area and to safely route these forces through the affected area, among others, routing tools are required that take into account the current state of the infrastructure [1]. The Institute of Transportation Systems of the German Aerospace Center has developed KeepOperational, a web-based, integrated decision support tool for traffic management and crisis logistics. As a key feature, this system can directly inject impairments of the transportation infrastructure-derived from various sourcesinto the routing network so that these disturbances will be considered by the routing algorithms.

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