Assessment and Evaluation

There are three main objectives:

• To assure the quality of research and development throughout the project.
• To evaluate the theoretical solutions of the problems identified within PESCaDO and the practical realizations of these solutions as manifested by the PESCaDO prototypes with respect to their performance and scalability.
• To assess and measure the achievement of the project’s research, technological, and demonstration objectives.

Already early in the project, the Consortium compiled a Quality Assurance Plan, in which the strategies have been outlaid for how to ensure a high quality of the work carried out in the project and for how to establish a smooth and efficient communication between the partners of the Consortium. This Plan has been put into practice, with a very positive outcome.
In the course of the project, evaluation metrics and qualitative questionnaires have been developed to assess the performance of the individual techniques and of the PESCaDO platform as a whole from both the technical and user satisfaction point of view. These metrics respectively questionnaires have been used to evaluate the First Prototype delivered in the summer of 2011. The quantitative performance evaluation has been carried out by experts in the corresponding research fields. The qualitative usability and utility evaluation has been done by a group of end users from the Helsinki area. The outcome of this combined evaluation guides the current work on the Second Prototype of the PESCaDO platform.

With the user need-oriented PESCaDO platform increasingly taking shape in the form of the successive operational prototypes, the assessment and evaluation assumes an increasingly central role in the work of the Consortium. In the near future, the Second Prototype of the platform will undergo a rigorous evaluation, again with respect to the performance of its technologies and its usability by end users.