PROTECT – Preparedness and Response Operations for The Enhancement of Critical infrastructure Threat resilience
Duration: 36 months (2026-2029)
PROTECT delivers the fundamental paradigm shift required to secure European Critical Infrastructure (CI) against modern, cascading hybrid disruptions. The project moves CI management from fragmented, reactive risk handling to a proactive, systemic resilience framework, directly supporting the ‘Safer and more secure Europe’ goal and the full-lifecycle crisis management. The central output is the PROTECT Recommendation Decision Support (RDS) Platform, a unified, AI-powered system designed to resolve the critical challenge of interdependency vulnerability across CI sectors. The platform’s innovation is rooted in semantic interoperability, enabling privacy-compliant, and federated fusion of multi-modal data streams. Through advanced, explainable AI/ML analytics, the RDS platform achieves a crucial shift from detection to proactive crisis prevention by accurately modelling CI Interdependencies and forecasting cascading failures before they materialize, thereby delivering real-time, actionable intelligence across the entire resilience lifecycle: preparedness, response, and recovery. To ensure high ambition and operational relevance (fitting the Open Topic), the solution will be validated across large-scale, strategically novel pilot sites. These validations are specifically designed to tackle highimpact cross-sector challenges, including the integration of physical security and high-frontier threats, combating hybrid climatecyber risks, and testing complex cyber-physical attacks in demanding industrial control and mobility environments. The PROTECT solution enhances operator training through advanced virtual and physical stress-testing tools and directly supports compliance with the CER and NIS2 Directives. To guarantee maximum strategic exploitation and scalable uptake across the EU, designated share of EU funding is allocated to Financial Support to Third Parties (FSTP) for rapid replication and validation by additional regional CI operators and authorities.
Контакт: Lazar.Berbakov@pupin.rs