Testbed Technical Infrastructure

Innovations that show great potential to bridge current capability gaps in the crisis management (CM) domain are to be evaluated first on their effectiveness and (dis)advantages before they are put to operational use. To perform an assessment, a realistic, gap-focused, and controllable trial should be setup, in which one or more staged crisis scenarios are played out. The testbed technical infrastructure is a set of open-source software tools to facilitate these trials. It consists of three main parts: The common information space (CIS) to which innovative solutions and current operational systems can be linked, such that they can exchange data with each other and such that they can receive (simulated) data from other connected sources. The common simulation space (CSS) to which simulators can be connected, such that these together create an immersive yet controllable fictive incident and feed the solutions and operational systems with data from this virtual crisis. Supportive tools to prepare, monitor, control, observe, and collect evaluation data of the trial. Use of the testbed is free of charge and scalable. Only those components needed for a specific trial have to be implemented (three examples are provided in this chapter) and all components are available as open-source on GitHub (excluding the solutions, operational systems, and simulators to be linked). The testbed can also be used to facilitate exercises, or even operationally to link up systems and (simulated) data sources, but that is outside the scope of this chapter. Apart from describing the functionalities and technical details of the testbed components, this chapter also provides a process description to design and configure the testbed and strongly advises to run a trial integration meeting (i.e. design of assessment use-cases, trial plan, and facilitative technology), a dry run 1 (i.e. technical test), and a dry run 2 (i.e. full-dress rehearsal or pilot run) before executing the actual trial. The testbed successfully facilitated the five trials and final demonstration during the DRIVER+ project and, in various setups, continues to support several other projects, trials, and exercises. The main take-home message is that by choosing only the testbed components that are needed, a lean, adequate, and powerful environment can be created for training and for assessing innovations.