Mr. Alkis Astyakopoulos, PROMENADE project manager, participated at the CERIS Workshop: “Methods and examples of piloting and validation of innovative border management solutions” organized by DG-HOME in Brussels on 9th March 2023.

In the second session of the Workshop, he presented practical experiences from the PROMENADE- EUH2020 project, a BES-03 demonstrator, on how pilot and validation activities can be undertaken in border management R&D.

The intervention focused mainly on three parts:

• The Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM), a user-oriented methodology for the design and development of information systems and its position within project life cycle.
• A series of ISO procedures that can be used to provide guidelines for the execution of trials under commonly agreed terminologies, to analyze the system quality requirements and to evaluate the system using ergonomics on human-system interactions.
• Practical challenges during piloting and validation that are mainly related to the engagement of practitioners, multi-disciplinary approach of trials, training, long scale validation, high TRL testing in operational environments, system modularity to operational needs, assets availability, telecommunications and last but not least technologies that remain permanently to the end-users.

PROMENADE project applies AI and Big Data technologies to improve vessel tracking, behaviour analysis and automatic anomaly detection services and promote collaborative exchange of information between surveillance authorities.