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.

Abstract. Regular international civil protection exercises are an important part of the European Civil Protection Mechanism. One such exercise, called IRONORE2019, took place in September 2019 in Eisenerz, Austria, with the aim of training international cooperation of relief teams in case of an earthquake. In parallel to this exercise, the European project DRIVER+ conduced a Trail in order to test novel solutions for civil protection. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) provided aerial imagery as well as derived map products to the project and the exercise, which were also made available to the Bavarian Red Cross, among others, as exercise participants. In this way, products developed using the latest scientific methods could be used and tested in practice. The valuable experiences from this operational use, which are explained in this article, serve the enhancement of the processes and products and will be implemented in the future in order to further support disaster management.

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