Tool: PORTFOLIO
OF SOLUTIONS

The portfolio of solutions is a web-based online platform that aims to document all relevant information regarding the solutions in the crisis management across Europe in such a way that different stakeholders can easily access this information. It also aims to standardise the language through the use of shared vocabulary of pre-defined taxonomies, so that for example, CM professionals, solution owners, CM practitioners and trial owners can work on the same level, and use the same terms, making the collaboration much easier. The trial guidance methodology describes a six step approach - an iterative process for trial preparation, where the last step includes selection of trial relevant solutions. The main role of the PoS in this step is to allow trial owners, and CM practitioners to select solutions that are going to be used and evaluated in the trial and that are related to the defined trial gaps, which are linked to CM functions. In other words, the PoS aims to help in the solution selection process, by offering the information on which CM functions are addressed by the solutions, so that they can be matched with the defined gaps.

Another important function of the PoS, is to propose a marketplace where providers can advertise their innovative solutions in the field of crisis management, and improve the chance of them being selected for a trial, or being used by CM practitioners. It also allows description of potential use cases, to give more insights on the actual use of the solutions.

The search functionality of the PoS enables an easy search through a large number of solutions, maintaining the high level of relevancy, by applying the correct filters that narrow the search results. A goal for the future is to make the PoS project independent, so that information about potential solutions for ongoing real-life crisis management problems is always available when needed.

The portfolio of solutions provides the possibility of describing a solution in a standardised way. The solution owner is able to state in which innovation stage the solution is currently in, what readiness level it has, which crisis cycle management phase is targeting, and which crisis size it covers. It also gives the opportunity to provide information on which standards are supported by the solution, and to upload and store all documentation regarding the solution, such as manuals, installation/ configuration guides etc. Solution providers can also describe use cases in which CM functions are addressed. Other than that, PoS allows references to be added to both internal DRIVER+ trials and external experiments, to give additional information on how the solution performed in real-life situations.

For the trial owners and CM practitioners, the PoS’s search function allows easy discovery of relevant solutions by filtering all information provided by the solution owner and by clearly stating which CM functions are being addressed. The solution overview page of the PoS is based on search API which implements deep search algorithms that allow searching through all components of the described solution for relevant terms, delivering fast, user-specified search and also gives the possibility to filter the solutions by CM functions, allowing easy matching with trial gaps. The PoS also implements a PDF export function to allows easy information extraction for further usage. This functionality can be combined with the filtering function that the tool offers to generate PDFs containing user-specified information, that being a description of a single solution, or for example, description of all solutions that address the same CM functions. Integrated help functionality is designed to help both solution owners in describing their solution in the best possible way and to help trial owners in selecting relevant solutions to be benchmarked in a trial.

The future goal of the PoS is to propose a marketplace where the next generations of CM practitioners will be able to find information related to solutions to fill the existing gaps in crisis management, and also to discover new innovative solutions provided by solution owners for arising problems.