Seguridad de infraestructuras de agua HERMES-CI

HERMES-CI: Water Infrastructure Resilience and Human Factors

What is HERMES-CI?

HERMES-CI is a European research project aimed at improving water infrastructure resilience by studying human factors and developing digital tools for critical water and wastewater systems. Its goal is to help operators, emergency teams and public authorities prevent incidents, coordinate their response and restore essential services.

The project analyses how fatigue, stress, workload, communication and decision-making can influence the safety and resilience of these infrastructures. To address these challenges, HERMES-CI combines social science research, artificial intelligence, monitoring technologies and digital twins.

HERMES-CI stands for Human Factor Enhanced Resilience and Monitoring for Critical Infrastructure. The solutions developed within the project will be validated through two pilot cases involving water and wastewater infrastructure in Cyprus and Romania.

ITCL contributes to the development of technologies for monitoring operators’ physical and cognitive state. Its work focuses on indicators related to fatigue, posture and workload, and on integrating these indicators into decision-support tools. These technologies will incorporate privacy protection measures and will be designed with the involvement of the professionals who will ultimately use them.

Objectives

The main objective of HERMES-CI is to integrate human factors into the resilience management of critical infrastructure. To achieve this, the project pursues the following objectives:

Understand the human factors affecting safety, identifying how individual capabilities, work organisation and coordination between organisations influence infrastructure resilience.
Improve communication and public trust, analysing technology acceptance and public responses to emergency-related communications.
Strengthen risk assessment and anticipation, through tools combining operational information and human-factor indicators.
Develop solutions for detecting insider threats, incorporating human oversight, data protection and ethical principles.
Support learning after incidents, by introducing procedures for investigation, recording and reviewing actions taken.
Improve the preparedness of operators and emergency teams, through training and exercises based on realistic scenarios.
Support the adoption of project results across Europe, developing guidelines and resources that facilitate their application in other organisations and sectors.

Results

HERMES-CI will develop an integrated platform together with a set of methodologies and tools designed to improve preparedness, response and learning before, during and after incidents.

The main expected results include:

A human-centred resilience management framework, supported by a Human Resilience Index incorporating relevant indicators for assessing infrastructure capabilities.
A mobile tool for sharing operational information, helping operators and authorities maintain situational awareness and coordinate decision-making.
Fatigue and workload monitoring solutions, designed to identify situations that may increase the risk of human error.
Risk assessment and insider threat detection tools, based on artificial intelligence and designed with privacy protection and human oversight.
A digital twin of water networks and a scenario generator, enabling emergency situations to be simulated and response procedures to be prepared.
Resources for incident investigation and lessons learned, including logs, templates and review mechanisms.
Citizen behaviour models and social impact assessment tools, aimed at improving communication and the acceptance of the proposed solutions.
Training programmes and a best-practice guide, aimed at operators, emergency teams and public authorities.

The solutions will be evaluated in the project’s two pilot cases. The integrated platform is expected to reach Technology Readiness Level 5 (TRL 5), corresponding to technology validation in a relevant environment.