Overview

In the first reporting period, the ENDURANCE project successfully established and validated the core strategic, technical and organizational foundations needed to strengthen the resilience of interconnected essential services across Europe. The consortium progressed from requirements definition and architectural design to TRL5 system prototypes, supported by the structured execution of pilot projects at European (MACRO), national/regional (MESO) and local (MICRO) levels.

The project approach – combining interoperable data infrastructures, data space, digital twins, resilience & risk intelligence, and stakeholder cooperation – was positively validated through the first pilot cycle and provided a solid basis for the next phase, focused on consolidation, scaling and operational maturity.

Progress on Key Technologies

Significant progress has been achieved across all core’s technological pillars.

Digital Twins for Interconnected Essential Services

ENDURANCE has delivered the first operational version of Primary Digital Twins representing interconnected essential services (e.g. energy, water, health, telecommunications, digital infrastructure). These Digital Twins provide geo‑referenced, multi‑domain ecosystem views underpinned by a harmonized ontology aligned with CER and NIS2 directives.
Key capabilities already validated include:

• modelling of CI assets, services, and cross‑sector dependencies,
• multi‑level visualization (asset, service, sector, ecosystem),
• integration of resilience indicators and dynamic filtering.

Trusted EU CER Data Space

The Trusted EU CER Data Space has been implemented and deployed using the DSP TRUE Connector. Core functionalities—dataset registration, catalogue management, identity and access management, secure contract negotiation, and initial real‑time data exchange—are operational. The Data Space provides the backbone for governed and interoperable data sharing across organisational and sectoral boundaries and is already integrated with storage, auditing, and analytical services.

Risk & Resilience Intelligence and Analytics

ENDURANCE has established a solid Risk & Resilience Intelligence framework, integrating:

• multi‑dimensional risk and resilience assessment,
• interdependency and cascading‑effect analysis,
• simulation and “what‑if” scenario evaluation.

The framework operationalizes the 8R Resilience Model through KPIs and composite metrics, including Cross‑X indicators and an Ecosystem Resilience Index (ERI), enabling resilience evaluation from asset to ecosystem level.

Secure Data Exchange and Federated Processing

Phase 1 prototypes of secure data exchange and federated processing were delivered, enabling distributed analytics while preserving data sovereignty. A proportionality‑based refinement of security mechanisms has been initiated for Phase 2, ensuring robustness while improving operational efficiency and scalability.

Consortium Goals and Implementation

Strategic Cooperation and Alignment

The consortium has successfully activated strong pan‑European cooperation mechanisms, including national workshops, European‑level workshops, a Pan‑European Working Group on Disruption Resilience, and an Advisory Board. These mechanisms directly inform both technical development and the evolving European Disruption Resilience Strategy.

Integrated Technical Framework

ENDURANCE delivered a coherent, modular system architecture linking data, analytics, Digital Twins, and services. Cross‑WP coordination ensures that stakeholder requirements, architectural refinements, data models, and pilot feedback are systematically translated into technical improvements.

Impact and Sustainability Orientation

Key exploitable assets have already been identified, Horizon Results Booster services activated, and clustering with sister projects and EU initiatives strengthened. This positions ENDURANCE within a wider European ecosystem for critical infrastructure resilience.

Feedback from End Users during the First Pilot Phase

End users strongly confirmed the value of Data Space, Risk and Resilience intelligence tools Digital Twin–based visualization, workforce Training  for understanding interdependencies and cascading effects across sectors, and for overall understanding of systemic resilience. They emphasized the importance of:

• flexible navigation between strategic ecosystem views and detailed operational views,
• role‑based and context‑aware filtering mechanisms,
• clear interpretation of resilience indicators and analytics.

Users also highlighted the need for transparent, explainable analytics suitable for crisis management and regulatory contexts. This feedback reinforced ENDURANCE’s design choice to position AI and analytics strictly as decision‑support tools with human oversight, rather than automated decision‑making systems.

From a data perspective, stakeholders supported the project’s progressive data integration strategy, starting with open and synthetic data and moving towards operational data only when governance, trust, and security conditions are fully established.

Outcomes of the First Pilot Cycle

The MACRO pilot validated a harmonised European methodology. MESO pilots (Romania and Slovenia) established high-fidelity ecosystem models and Digital Twin-supported exercises and generated structured feedback on interdependency modelling and crisis escalation under compound threat scenarios.

The MICRO pilots (Italy and Greece) validated specific technical capabilities, including federated learning workflows and multi‑layer detection mechanisms, demonstrating complete end‑to‑end data and analytics pipelines in controlled environments.

The first pilot cycle confirms the technical soundness and relevance of the ENDURANCE approach at TRL5 and provides a strong evidence base for the next development phase.

Key Aspects Looking Forward to the Next Phase

The next phase of ENDURANCE will focus on consolidation, scaling, and operational readiness.

Key priorities include:

• strengthening data ingestion pipelines and metadata governance,
• refining the ecosystem ontology towards more operational and temporal semantics,
• enhancing dynamic, multi‑layer interdependency modelling and filtering,
• advancing resilience and risk assessment services towards TRL7 through large‑scale pilot validation.

In parallel, the consortium will finalize and validate the European Disruption Resilience Strategy, deepen engagement with policy and standardization bodies, and further develop exploitation and uptake pathways for the most mature project results.