*3.3.2 Conduct validation exercise*

Following the specific BC scenario storyline, the involved actors are guided and supported by the capabilities of the SecureGas system in order to respond to a security incident.

**137**

*Validation Strategy as a Part of the European Gas Network Protection*

Following the BCs pilots' implementation, the participants are asked to use the validation/evaluation tool/method (e.g. fill a specifically designed questionnaire,

The assessment of results and feedback gathered leads to a holistic evaluation outcome, respective lessons identified and recommendations for further analysis.

This last step of the methodology contains the analysis of the gathered evaluation results as well as an assessment of the SecureGas solution. The results of this step will be presented in the overall SecureGas evaluation and lessons identified report.

The results assessment aims to collect valuable feedback from the end-users interactions during the pilots (via questionnaires, described in detail in Section 4.4), expressed opinions and comments through focus groups and end-session interviews. The purpose of this substep is to indicate among others whether the SecureGas solution is performing well, provides useful information, is easy to understand, reliable,

The final step in each BC pilot demonstration will summarize and present all the activities realized and the responses by involved actors' (both consortium partners and external experts). Based on these outcomes, an overall performance evaluation of the SecureGas solution will be reported, lessons, recommendations and conclusions will be extracted, and content for knowledge transfer will be structured.

Within the SecureGas framework and specifically in the third phase of the project, that of validation and exploitation, several tools will be used in order to support the efficient implementation of the validation plan described in Section 3 above. These tools consists of: (a) an initial assessment tool, that will be used as a decision support tool to carry out a self-assessment to identify the level of intrusiveness and level of maturity of the CI, (b) the penetration testing tool/methodology for identifying vulnerabilities and assessing performance, (c) the KPIs that will be used as benchmarks to assess project's efficiency in reaching its key objectives and to evaluate the quality of the proposed technical solution, and finally (d) questionnaires and interviews as two main instruments for evaluation purposes.

In the first step of the validation plan, the context is set as described in subSection 3.1. The validation plan follows the same approach as a pre-attack phase gathering as much information as possible on the target systems and planning the activities performed during the tests. Assessment frameworks such as [42, 43] can

be used to identify the level of intrusiveness and level of maturity.

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.94644*

see Section 4). In some cases, interviews are held.

*3.3.3 Assess data quality*

**3.4 Assess results**

*3.4.1 Assess results*

ergonomic, efficient, etc.

**4.1 Initial assessments**

*3.4.2 Prepare validation and evaluation report*

**4. Validation and evaluation tools**
