**4.4 Questionnaires and interviews**

Within the context of the evaluation of SecureGas components and solution, two main instruments will be used: questionnaires and interviews.

Regarding the first one, two types of questionnaires will be used for the evaluation purposes, one more generic that can be distributed to all participants (during testing, demonstrations, workshops) and one more specific, that would be filled by targeted participants within the audience, as further described below:


Regarding the second instrument for evaluation, indicative topics that may be used for discussion during the interviews comprise:


### **5. Conclusions**

The validation framework is a key activity of every project, which broadly includes the validation of the proposed solution to determine whether it satisfies specified requirements, the verification of the system specifications, and the evaluation of the developed solution, all further analyzed as processes in Section 2. In the framework of the SecureGas project, the developed solution is a set of technological components and practical tools which aim to strengthen the resilience of the European gas network.

The envisaged validation framework (Section 3) mainly includes two types of assessment (Section 4): (a) Quantitative assessment, using a series of KPIs to validate components and the solution as a whole, (b) Qualitative assessment, based upon a dedicated questionnaire and interview, to get feedback from participants in the BCs implementation.

The methodological procedure, described in Section 3 of this chapter, is of no doubt necessary for any technological team providing a solution in order to identify potential gaps and updates needed. Furthermore, it is also valuable for end-users, in order to recognize the suitability of the proposed solution based on their requirements and specific security issues and appreciate the added value offered. Such validation framework is applicable, at least as a concept, to all projects offering technological solutions towards CI operators (or other type of end users) and can be adapted and tailor made to each case, leading to valuable feedback. On the other hand, the proposed methodology may need some adjustments, in order to cover the needs of an end-user that would like to assess and validate a process or a procedure that may have already in hand or is proposed (e.g. KPIs redefinition, questionnaires restructuring, etc.).

The next steps of this research contain the implementation of the BCs, based on this validation plan, and the documentation of the results of each BC, consolidating them into an overall validation and performance evaluation, which may lead to lessons identified, best practices and recommendations for the interested stakeholders.

#### **Acknowledgements**

The chapter was supported by the European Commission [Project SecureGas, GA No 833017] and the Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic [Project CIRFI 2019, GA No VI20192022151].

**145**

**Author details**

Anastasia Chalkidou4

\*, Martin Hromada<sup>2</sup>

, Ilias Gkotsis3

1 VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, Faculty of Safety Engineering, Ostrava,

, Karolina Jurkiewicz<sup>5</sup>

2 Technology Platform Energy Security, Prague, Czech Republic

5 APRE – Agenzia per la Promozione della Ricerca Europea, Rome, Italy

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

3 KEMEA - Center for Security Studies, Athens, Greece

\*Address all correspondence to: david.rehak@vsb.cz

4 GAP Analysis S.A., Athens, Greece

6 Rina Consulting S.p.A., Genoa, Italy

provided the original work is properly cited.

, Anna Gazi3

, Fabio Bolletta6

, Evita Agrafioti4

and Clemente Fuggini6

,

David Rehak1

Czech Republic

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

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

### **Conflict of interest**

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

*Validation Strategy as a Part of the European Gas Network Protection DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.94644*
