From June 28th to June 30th 2022, the second Pilot of the EU-funded BroadWay project took place in Kerkrade, a Dutch municipality located at the borders of Belgium and Germany, for the second trial of the EU-funded BroadWay project.

“We are happy to host this second trial in The Netherlands, in Kerkrade. The town being located right at the border with Belgium in Germany, it is ideally located to show that the solutions developed within the project are working” said Feiko VERMEULEN, from the Dutch National Police.

BroadWay is a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project launched in 2016, which is procuring solutions to enable Operational mobility for Public Safety services. With the BroadWay pilots, the project intends to show how it is possible for public services to cooperate wherever they are, whenever they need to and with with whoever they are tasked to cooperate.

The solutions were already evaluated by the group of BroadWay Buyers from 11 European Countries earlier in 2022. In this last series of pilots, the prototypes are again being assessed by a heterogenous group of around 50 practitioners called the BroadWay Practitioner Evaluation Team collectively tested and evaluated the separate solutions developed by the two consortia respectively led by FREQUENTIS and AIRBUS, in a cross-border drug smuggling criminal chase simulation through the borders of the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

“The involvement of practitioners has been a key element since the inception of BroadWay. Now that we are reaching the final stage, getting their feedback is again crucial to allow suppliers to improve their solutions and ensure they fulfill the operational needs of practitioners ” stated David Lund, Coordinator of the BroadWay Project.

The pilot in Kerkrade is the second in a series of three Trials. The first one took place early June 2022 in Ljubljana, Slovenia while the last one will take place in Malaga,Spain, during the last week of July 2022.