New €10m EU-funded SUNRISE Project Will Strengthen Vital Services Across Europe

Logo: SUNRISE project

• Digital leaders ATOS IT Solutions and Services, Iberia in Spain will lead a new major European research and innovation project to improve the resilience of infrastructures affected by major disaster scenarios such as pandemics.

• The SUNRISE Project will develop effective strategies and technologies to ensure the resilience of ‘lifeline’ services in Europe.

• SUNRISE technologies and solutions will improve the planning and management of critical infrastructures such as transport, energy, water, and healthcare.

As Europe continues to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, its citizens and governments are looking ahead to futureproof society’s lifeline structures. The new EU-funded SUNRISE project aims to ensure greater availability, reliability, and continuity of critical infrastructures in Europe including transport, energy, water, and healthcare. Over the next three years, 41 partner organisations will work together to develop a suite of novel technologies and solutions that will improve the resilience of these critical infrastructures against the impact of pandemics and other major risks. Coordinated by the Spanish arm of global cloud and digital service company, ATOS IT Solutions and Services Iberia SL, the SUNRISE project has been awarded €10m in funding by the EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme.

Hereon/GERICS will contribute to the analysis of extreme weather events and projected climate change, that puts a risk to CIs, but also influences the occurrence and of pandemic events, as well as demand side changes for several services. Such weather sensitive services include energy, drinking water supply, and transport. Together with partners, we will develop new tools and service products to forecast and assess these changes, and deliver tools to CI operators for their management. These methods and tools will include applications of AI and Machine Learning, to deriver patterns and decision indicators.

Rodrigo Díaz Rodríguez, head of the Cybersecurity Unit within the R&D group at ATOS IT Solutions:

“We’re delighted to introduce the SUNRISE project and continue the growing research into making Europe’s vital services as resilient as possible. Protecting the health and security of citizens across the EU in response to some of the biggest threats humanity is facing today requires member states and agencies to collaborate for the common good and ensuring that our vital services are durable is a key step to achieving that. The tools and solutions developed in this project will benefit all EU citizens.”

The outputs of SUNRISE will equip critical infrastructure operators to respond to pandemics and other major threats by enabling them to recover quickly from expected and unexpected disruptions.

Speaking at the recent kick-off meeting of SUNRISE in Madrid, Spain, project coordinator Antonio Alvarez Romero from ATOS IT Solutions said:

“Future major risks will test the resilience of our critical infrastructures which are of extreme importance to our societies. However, essential service operators and authorities in Europe are still not adequately equipped to address such risks. The project’s state-of-the-art tools will establish cross-border collaboration and share best practices between critical infrastructure operators. We will identify the different needs they have and develop technical tools to meet those needs. SUNRISE will make our infrastructures more resilient whether it be during pandemics or other problems that we may face as a society.”

Describing the impact of SUNRISE for Europe, Mr. Alvarez further commented:

“There are many things in the SUNRISE project that makes it unique. We are working in the areas of collaboration, technology and data to create new tools and bring them to the market. There is an excellent mix of more than 40 profiles in the project, including organisations from different backgrounds and nationalities. This gives our research insight into the specificities of each EU country and the needs of their critical infrastructures. SUNRISE will create a lasting impact on critical infrastructures in Europe, making them more resilient into the future.”

The SUNRISE project's research is well underway and partners will soon conduct a series of workshops with critical infrastructure operators in Spain, Italy and Slovenia in November. During these workshops, the partners will gather first-hand knowledge directly from operators that will inform the project’s results.

For more information please contact:

The SUNRISE Team

The SUNRISE project consortium is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme and is made up of 41 European leaders and experts from the health, security, social science, humanities, information technology, epidemiology, communications and emergency management fields, ensuring that the most modern science and research serve the real-world needs of healthcare, government and society. SUNRISE is being led by ATOS IT Solutions and Services Iberia SL.

SUNRISE Tools

Tool for Risk Based Access Control (RiBAC)

This tool focuses on risk-based access control (RiBAC) and will help ensure reduced risk for access to critical infrastructure in a scalable and privacy-preserving way.

Tool for Remote Physical Infrastructure Inspection

This tool focuses on the development of a flexible, CI-agnostic tool to manage the changing demand of CI resources (both human and infrastructure) during emergency scenarios.

Tool for Increased Cyber-Physical Resilience

This tool will detect anomalies, raise alarms when incidents are materialized and will provide proper responses, while performing a real-time risk assessment of the critical infrastructure. The tool will also be equipped with a suitable dashboard that will enable decision-making.

Tool for Rescource Demand Prediction and Management

This tool will deliver a solution for continuous, data-driven physical infrastructure inspection by means of satellite images, the use of UAVs with different sensors and the use of ML methods for anomaly detection.

ATOS Solutions

ATOS is a global leader in digital transformation with 112,000 employees across the world. As the European number one in cybersecurity, cloud and high-performance computing, the Group provides tailored end-to-end solutions for all industries in 71 countries. A pioneer in decarbonization services and products, Atos is committed to secure and decarbonized digital solutions. Atos is a SE (Societas Europaea) and listed on Euronext Paris.

HORIZON Europe

HORIZON Europe is the EU’s key funding programme for research and innovation. It tackles climate change, helps to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and boosts the EU’s competitiveness and growth. The programme facilitates collaboration and strengthens the impact of research and innovation in developing, supporting and implementing EU policies while tackling global challenges. It supports creating and better dispersing of excellent knowledge and technologies.

HORIZON Europe website