About SUNRISE
As Europe continues to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, its citizens and governments are looking ahead to futureproof society’s lifeline structures. The EU-funded SUNRISE project aims to ensure greater availability, reliability, and continuity of critical infrastructures in Europe including transport, energy, water, and healthcare.
From October 2022 to September 2025, 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. The SUNRISE consortium includes 18 public and private CI operators and authorities.
Objectives:
- Facilitate active collaboration among CIs within and across European borders, within and across different sectors, between public and private stakeholders
- Identify pandemic-specific vital services and CIs in Europe, their interactions and dependencies, the risks and cascading effects among them, and effective countermeasures at European level.
- Develop a comprehensive strategy and a set of mature technologies for CI resilience and business continuity in a pandemic, following the Quintuple Helix innovation model.
- Pilot the new strategy and technologies in real-world conditions across Europe.
- Enhance knowledge, awareness, and capacities for unity and resilience in Europe.
new solutions to be developed:
- Facilitate collaboration, cooperation, and unity among public and private critical infrastructure (CI) operators and competent authorities across different critical sectors and across entire Europe, discouraging them to work in isolation.
- Understand interdependencies between the CIs and the associated risks and cascading effects among them, enabling the definition of effective measures that are aligned with the needs of societies, economies, and climate, thereby providing for a better preparedness and resilience to future health crises.
- Minimize the exposure of essential workers with a solution for a risk-based access control to critical facilities.
- Better forecast and manage rapidly changing demands for vital resources (physical, digital, and human).
- Increase cyber-physical resilience to ensure a reliable, robust, and continuous operation of digital services.
- Remotely inspect physical infrastructure to ensure resilience and continuity of critical services during periods with less available skilled workers while addressing more frequent and more extreme natural disasters.
With these, SUNRISE significantly, directly, and immediately increases resilience of CIs, improves safety, wellbeing, and trust of citizens, and supports the move towards climate-friendly operations across Europe.