Project’s Impact

Through this research, we aim to support water utilities and enable them to safeguard their core mission, to provide safe water to consumers and future-proof them against a new era of emerging CP threats. From the project conception phase, the main objective was to increase its impact. In particular, PROCRUSTES aims to ensure the product uptake from, at least, the national water utilities, to support their decision making and enhance their resilience, no matter their size and their capabilities. To this end, the project has gained support of EYDAP S.A., EYATH S.A. and EDEYA. EYDAP S.A. serves 4,3 million users, EYATH S.A. serves 1,2 million users and EDEYA represents 119 municipal water utilities that serve about 5,2 million water users.

Therefore, PROCRUSTES supporting water utilities represent more than 95% of the water utility companies in Greece and include both big utilities (EYDAP S.A. and EYATH S.A.) with large cyber-physical systems to manage and small and medium utilities (members of EDEYA) with smaller networks, technical capabilities and expertise. The aim is to involve all these water utilities, with different means and for different purposes, in defining both their requirements and their capabilities. This will allow to create PROCRUSTES final product in a way that can be used by both large and small medium water utilities. This increases the belief that the uptake of PROCRUSTES results will be satisfactory and water utilities will use it to address the water utility challenges and secure water supply.

PROCRUSTES confronts major challenges, such as the security of water supply, by addressing a modern problem of water utilities, that of cyber, physical and their combination threats to their critical infrastructure system. PROCRUSTES objectives are ambitious, allowing for progress beyond scientific excellence focusing on the water sector while technologically leveraging tools developed for more general resilience scenario planning. Hence it provides a unique overview of the cyber-physical risk landscape of water utilities and supports its translation into measurable scenarios for stress-testing. This knowledge is expected to enhance the delivered services and products both in depth (the technological solutions) and in width (covering different areas with different requirements). PROCRUSTES will help to see these risks in a structured and comparable way.

PROCRUSTES will ensure that physical, cyber and their combination vulnerabilities will be analysed, providing a consistent guide for CI protection in a large class of water utilities.
This impact is ensured by delivering a stress-testing platform to assess the criticality of assets by calculating the impacts of risk events under customised, end-user driven scenarios. In order to have a high level of acceptability, this will build on and be aligned with existing national guidelines for vulnerability assessment as well as proven modelling and optimisation tools. These steps will be complemented by providing water system operators with a knowledge-base of risk reduction measures and options and a stress testing-platform for selected options in a specific semi-hypothetical CPS.

Through the development of novel safety and security planning methods and tools for the water sector, the project enhances the country’s scientific and technological development and competitiveness of research and innovation and may foster economic growth for the emerging market of CI security, beyond the water sector (i.e. energy, oil, gas, transportation). For the water sector, PROCRUSTES will have a major impact, as CIs associated to water utilities have not been highly prioritized in the past. The results will allow the development of new security plans to protect CIs associated to the water networks, as well as new avenue of business activities related to security audits in water utilities. By safeguarding the vital societal need of water supply, the impact of the current research extends to the protection of health, safety and the environment.