## 1 Introduction
Within the perspective of a coordinated disaster response, the Italian Civil Protection system takes advantage of the joint effort of its different components: the UAS teams of the Competence Centres are among the resources that can be deployed to support the national fire brigades (CNVF), which are in charge of the overall coordination of urgent technical response. The Competence Centres of the Italian Civil Protection Department constitutes a network providing services, information, data and technical-scientific contributions in specific areas. Such functional center networks include state governments, agencies, research institutes, universities and basin authorities. All the teams operating under the coordination of the CNVF but not belonging to fire brigades are called \"external bodies\". The challenge was not only technical: the idea was to establish and test a comprehensive standardized methodology, intended as a guideline applicable on a large scale as it combines technical, operational and planning aspects together. For the first time, standard protocols for UAS operations and activation were defined, tested and supported for the occasion by the Italian UAS U-space service provider (D-flight, [36]), in agreement with the national aviation authorities (ENAC and ENAV) and the national fire brigades. A second part of the exercise focused on the technical aspects. First of all, with regard to data collection, the surveys carried out by the different teams responsible for mapping the assigned parts of the overall are, must be comparable; therefore, they were conducted on the basis of common protocols. Finally, the data collected requires rapid processing to be made available to the coordination center within times compatible with the needs of organizing rescue operations. The initial joint activities were then followed by individual specific assignments still related to drone assessments in an emergency context but will not be discussed within this paper. The exercise scenario was based on the simulation of the occurrence of an earthquake of Mw = 6.0, which struck the territory of Mantua county in northern Italy (Figure 1 and more details in Section 3): the Civil Protection operations room of the Lombardy Region was activated, and the response activities were coordinated by the CNVF. Regarding UAS support activities to CNVF, the following Competence Centres of the Italian Civil Protection Department took part in the exercise joint activities: EUCENTRE Foundation, CIMA Research Foundation, the Civil Protection Centre of the University of Firenze (UNIFI), the National Research Council (CNR), the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) and the regional Agencies for Environment of Lombardia, Valle d'Aosta and Calabria (ARPA Lombardia, ARPA VDA and ARPACAL). In this first experimentation of the system, three \"macro-areas\" of activity were conducted, focusing on aspects deemed to be of primary interest:  
1. The coordination of air operations, which involved the CNVF and the UAS networks through the establishment of a main coordination center of overall air operations (CCOA), a second one close to the affected area as a liaison between the former and the on-site response (both managed by the CNVF) and a UAS coordination center for the technical activities of UAS networks (UAS CCT), operating at the local level in close cooperation with the other two. The focus of the exercise was to test the chain for requesting activities, the procedures for activating the no-fly zone (NFZ), as well as the activation and management of the UAS activities of the so-called \"external bodies\" (i.e., not belonging to the CNVF);
2. A joint technical activity, which saw the participation of the involved Competence Centers (EUCENTRE, CIMA, UNIFI, CNR, INGV, ARPA Lombardia, ARPA VDA, ARPACAL).