Maturity assessment for civil security

In order to avoid communication problems between different teams of engineers and scientists, NASA developed a uniform scale for assessing the development status of new technologies, the "technology readiness level" scale, in the 1970s. Since then, similar maturity scales have also been established and further developed in other industries. However, today there is a lack of an objective uniform model, which means that assessments from different organizations often lead to different results. It is precisely this problem of a lack of common understanding of maturity or readiness that MultiRATE is trying to solve for civil security products in Europe.

MultiRATE (Holistic framework for the MatUrity evaLuaTIon of ReAdiness level for security), a project funded by the Horizon Europe program with a duration of four years, was launched in December 2022. In addition to Fraunhofer INT, twelve other organizations from eleven different European countries are working on this project. It deals with the development of an evaluation tool to assess the maturity of technologies and processes for European civil security, e.g. for law enforcement or disaster resilient societies. The special feature of the tool is that the object of investigation or innovation is evaluated from seven different perspectives. In addition to the technical maturity, the social attitude towards a technology, its market suitability, production capacities, security maturity, its integration level or ethical-legal aspects can be determined individually, but also a holistic evaluation will be possible. The aim of the project is for the tool to support different actors in critical decision-making related to objective self-assessment, acquisition of equipment or investment.

Fraunhofer INT‘s task focus is on the development of methods for determining the maturity level in the category "security". In doing so, previous methods are to be harmonized as well as further developed. In short, research will be conducted on topics such as IT, OT, cyber, but also physical security, and a method and tool for evaluating an innovation’s security readiness level will subsequently be derived and developed.