CEN/CWA 18028:2023 is one of the outcomes of the standardisation gap analysis and resulting pre-standardisation activities promoted by  STRATEGY project , funded under EU Horizon 2020 R&I programme (GA Nº88520) and developed by CEN/Workshop Improvement of information processing in crisis management of critical infrastructures for computer assisted data gathering, display and reporting. This CWA is part of the STRATEGY project standardisation footprint, a successful case on how to valorise a research project result through standardisation, aligned with the EU Code of Practice and its success factors.

The CWA was drafted and agreed with the participation of more than 40 stakeholders from command and control centers, academia, research institutes, industries, CI operators, standardisation organizations, international consortia and first responders from several EU Member States, aiming for a broad participation and consensus among relevant actors in the CI’s crisis management.

Besides, it was fully tested and evaluated in a Table-Top Exercise and Full-Scale Exercise within STRATEGY project against the operational needs and end-users’ perspective, aiming to improve crisis management and resilience for critical infrastructures.

As there is currently no standard that allows defining how to express all information gathered during a crisis, forcing to upgrade the system upon incorporation of any new sensor or software exploiting their data and increasing unnecessarily adoption times and costs, CEN/CWA 18028:2023 aims to solve this gap by providing a semantic layer with the names of all properties that are not covered by existing standards, so they can be used in any message that sends the information as a pair of names and values.

Additionally, CEN/CWA 18028:2023 evaluates the suitability of OASIS EDXL-CAP and OASIS EDXL-SitRep standards for defining the format of electronic messages to be transmitted during a crisis involving critical infrastructures. For this purpose, the CWA contains a list of operational needs of responders, analyses the information to be transmitted for each of them and the specific fields of those standards to be used to transmit the needed information. Based on this analysis, the CWA identifies which operational needs can be supported by those standards and which cannot, and how this could be fixed.