The European Defence Fund (EDF) is the Commission’s initiative to support collaborative defence research and development, and to foster an innovative and competitive defence industrial base.
The specific objective of this topic is to substitute the fossil fuel dependency reduction in military deployable camps (support and mobility) without any drop of operational performances, in a context of increasing electrical energy demand in the battlefield. Moreover, investigation on the return of experience of the demonstration stage, should include specifications of a whole concept of energy independent and efficient deployable camps. Furthermore, the ability to support the diminution of their fossil fuel consumptions while maintaining operational performances, avoiding logistics, security burden and reducing logistics footprint should be validated.
Proposals must address a full-scale operational demonstrator of a deployable camp fulfilling interoperability between inter-allied armies and NATO, with a modular and easily deployable energy system and adaptable energy mix.
Proposals must pursue the feasibility study of different technologies to answer to the identified needs of the Member States and EDF Associated Countries while ensuring the interoperability of systems and taking into consideration opportunities such as autonomy or resilience. As innovative solutions evolve rapidly, the proposals should update results generated through the latest research in this domain. In addition, proposals should demonstrate the effectiveness of logistics and maintenance in different scenarios (e.g., Host Nation Support, Contractor Support to Operations or by military themselves).
Proposals must design and produce the solutions (production, storage and management modules, including control and command interfaces, communication protocols, and operational simulation and planning systems). In order to ensure their safe use, functional tests must be performed before the demonstration stage.
Proposals must address physical experiment of the most critical technological modules deployed in military camps, especially the most vulnerable ones toward harsh environmental conditions and demanding operational scenarios, including resilience against electronic warfare, cyber-attacks and electromagnetic pulse.
Proposals must split the demonstration of the technological modules in different locations hosted by several Member States in different representative environment (cold/warm weather, dust, number of occupants, deployment duration, type of mission, etc.). In addition, the proposals must validate a wide range of operational use cases and assess the adaptability of the technology for the deployment in different scenarios. Adding up, they should ensure testing, validation and qualification of the overall concept through simulation activities in real military context including in harsh conditions. Furthermore, the ability of the energy architectures and protocols endorsed to operate in civil-based (non-rugged) solutions should be demonstrated. The demonstration should cover the simulation and planning tools.
The focus must be on military use-cases, taking into account specific harsh military environment (cold/heat/dust), different deployments and conflict intensities (including the shift from low-intensity conflict to high-intensity warfare), different deployed infrastructures, different life-time phases of the camp (storage, building, operation and redeployment phase) and military heavy constraints (logistic, maintenance, training, risk management, unmanned).
In order to be eligible, the applicants (beneficiaries and affiliated entities) must:
Consortium composition – Proposals must be submitted by:
minimum 3 independent applicants (beneficiaries; not affiliated entities) from 3 different eligible countries.
Ministry of Defense
Address: 172-174 Strovolos Avenue, 2048 Strovolos, Nicosia
Telephone: 22 807500
Email: defence@mod.gov.cy
Website: https://mod.gov.cy/
Department of Research and Innovation
Telephones: 22 807755, 22 807754
Email: research.innovation@mod.gov.cy
For help related to this call, please contact: DEFIS-EDF-PROPOSALS@ec.europa.eu