###### Abstract  
Flooding represents the most-occurring and deadliest threats worldwide among natural disasters. Consequently, new technologies are constantly developed to improve response capacities in crisis management. The remaining challenge for practitioner organizations is not only to identify the best solution to their individual demands, but also to test and evaluate its benefit in a realistic environment before the disaster strikes. To bridge the gap between theoretic potential and actual integration into practice, the EU-funded project DRIVER+ has designed a methodical and technical environment to assess innovation in a realistic but non-operational setup through trials. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) interdisciplinary merged mature technical developments into the \"Airborne and terrestrial situational awareness\" system and applied it in a DRIVER+ Trial to promote a sustainable and demand-oriented R&D. Experienced practitioners assessed the added value of its modules \"KeepOperational\" and \"ZKI\" in the context of large-scale flooding in urban areas. The solution aimed at providing contextual route planning in police operations and extending situational awareness based on information derived through aerial image processing. The user feedback and systematically collected data through the DRIVER + Test-bed approved that DLR's system could improve transport planning and situational awareness across organizations. However, the results show a special need to consider, for example, cross-domain data-fusion techniques to provide essential 3D geo-information to effectively support specific response tasks during flooding.  
c 2020 10 3743 10.3390/app10113743 10.  
Resilience) [1], funded by the European Union, aims to adapt European crisis management (CM) to future demands through providing a pan-European Test-bed for CM capability development. This includes a Portfolio of Solutions [2] to identify innovative tools, applications, or procedures; a common Trial Guidance Methodology [3] as a step-by-step guidance for the approach of trialing; and an open-source Test-bed Technical Infrastructure (TTI) [4; 5; 6], which is a toolkit to support conducting a trial event through various software components. By definition, a trial is a systematic but pragmatic approach to assess potential impact of change in the sociotechnical setup of a CM organization. The term pragmatic stands for its flexible design that is tailored to the working conditions of CM practitioners, but simultaneously preserves objectivity in the assessment of promising solutions. The DRIVER+ project pursed the goal to empower practitioner organizations to apply the technical infrastructure and method themselves for their own benefit. On this journey, a total of four trials and a final demonstration were conducted throughout the project lifetime of DRIVER+, each focusing on different aspects of CM across Europe. All of these trials where characterized by a fundamental active participation of CM practitioners. Through this repetitive process, the Trial Guidance Methodology as well as the TTI capabilities were reviewed and adapted according to experiences made and feedback received.  
The German Aerospace Center (DLR) was involved in the DRIVER+ project not only as provider of an innovative application system, but also as main organizer of a trial conducted in The Hague that focused on severe flooding. In the so-called trial \"The Netherlands\", DLR teamed up with the hosting organization Safety Region Haaglanden (regional institution for CM) to design the event in a practitioner-driven approach, addressing real capability needs of flood response in The Netherlands. Through a multi-level selection procedure, the appointed trial committee selected two modules of DLR's system \"Airborne and Terrestrial Situation Awareness\"--namely \"ZKI\" and \"KeepOperational\"--to demonstrate their capabilities in the trial along with four other emerging technologies.