Water infrastructures are essential for human society, life and health. They can be endangered by physical or cyber threats with severe societal consequences.
To protect them, STOP-IT brings together a strong team of 23 partners from all across Europe and Israel to develop solutions to the most pressing threats.
The team identifies risks and co-develops an all-hazards risk management framework for the physical and cyber protection of critical water infrastructures.
Project News
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Featured Innovation
The Public Warning Notification System (PWNS)
STOP-IT has developed a Public Warning Notification System (PWNS) with two main functionalities: detect and report incidents and inform users and citizens.
The PWNS processes data, alerts and detected incidents from external sources and reports them to the STOP-IT core platform. At this initial stage the incident has to be validated by a human operator in most cases. Once this is done, the anomaly is notified to the system that, by cross-checking with other incident-related data from different sources, can identify the risk situation. This assessment then will be sent to the visualisation interface for water utilities, which starts a response plan with actions to be executed. These are based on different parameters set by water operators and can include both corrective and mitigation measures. The system also sends the information and instructions to follow to the users and citizens using the most appropriate channels, i.e. email, SMS, mobile app notifications, etc.
Water agencies, regulators, municipalities and environmental agencies can benefit from this Public Warning Notification System. The tool is publicly available and open source. At this stage however, the system uses OneMind, the proprietary solution of Worldsensing, as visualisation interface. The STOP-IT solution for the user interface is currently being developed by RISA within the project.
The system operation can be seen in this video and this picture shows the modular components of the Public Warning Notification System.
Testimonials
„The water sector of the future will be smart: the intelligent integration and analysis of data from different sources will continuously create new opportunities, but also increase system vulnerability facilitated by the ever-changing landscapes of the digital world. The STOP-IT integrated platform aims to make water systems secure and resilient by improving preparedness, awareness and response level to physical, cyber threats, and their combination! I am looking forward to work with such an amazing, motivated and inspiring project consortium and I am optimistic that together we will be able to protect water infrastructure and ensure a safer, smarter, and more efficient water service to everyone.“
~ Rita Ugarelli (STOP-IT coordinator, SINTEF Norway)
„Cyber security should be the concern of every water network operator, not only security nerds!“
~Martin Gilje Jaatun (Security officer and WP10 leader, SINTEF Norway)
„Researchers, scientists, developers and manufacturers from all across Europe are working together in order to make water infrastructure safer for all of us and I am excited to work with such a diverse and professional team.“
~ Lisa Zimmermann (Scientific Journalist, IWW Germany)
„Participation in the STOP-IT project not only reaffirms Cetaqua’s commitment to the research towards better protection of water infrastructures, but also represents a great opportunity to work together with Europe’s leading experts.“
~ Enric Bonet (WP3 leader, Cetaqua Spain)
„Demosthenes said: ‚Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises‘. In the STOP-IT project we have a huge opportunity to produce great research outcomes targeting to the holistic protection of the water infrastructures against physical and cyber threats.“
~Prof. Anastasios Doulamis (WP7 leader, ICCS Greece)
