The science and knowledge service of the European Commission, the Joint Research Centre's mission is to support EU policies with independent evidence throughout the whole policy cycle. Through its Space, Security and Migration Directorate in Ispra, the JRC conducts research in the area of Crisis Management. The activity includes the development and management of Early Warning Systems for several types of Natural Disasters, ranging from sudden evolving events such as Earthquakes to long term trends like Droughts. The objective is to model the impact that those events may pose and thus supporting the efforts of the Humanitarian Community, inside (with DG-ECHO Commission service) and outside the EU (UN agencies, mainly OCHA).
The European Crisis Management Laboratory of the Directorate develops new technologies to support the activities of the European Commission in the area of Civil Protection, including the development of sensors and alerting devices. The experience of several years and the technical innovations led to create an Operating System (OS) able to manage all the functionality requested from remotely deployed devices, that must be reliable and resilient.
The Remote InterOperability platform requires a software to manage the remotely deployed devices and an infrastructure to support it.
The RIO software on the devices acts as a guest Operating System hosted by a native one to manage the features installed in the device. It is therefore able to implement remote sensors as well as alerting devices.
In order to develop such a flexible software, .Net Core has been adopted, since this programming environment is available on many platforms including 32 and 64 bit Windows machines, Linux machines including small microcomputers and macOS machines.
RIO needs an infrastructure to communicate with the devices; its description includes the network servers used to implement it, their configuration, the protocols and the formats adopted.
The technology was used for the development of several devices successfully tested; some use cases will be described.