Kaiserslautern/Darmstadt, September 7, 2021 – The catastrophic flooding that occurred in the German Ahr Valley in July, drastically highlighted the requirement for fast and secure provision of reliable information in crisis situations. It is insufficient for public, civilian, and industrial control centers and situation centers to receive timely information. In order to avert hazards, required information must also be connected and distributed without fail, free of individual decision-makers’ judgement.
To enable efficient and effective cooperation among all relevant stakeholders, the SPELL project was launched in June, with support from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. With the digital, AI-based SPELL platform, control centers with different software systems will automatically be connected with one another and in compliance with data-protection requirements via digital interfaces.
As a project partner, Empolis contributes its extensive expertise in the field of AI-based solutions to support decision-making. These solutions have been utilized with excellent results for years to consolidate and analyze situational information, as a basis for critical decision making. Empolis relies on transparent AI methodologies which, not only learn from data and can, therefore, implement regulations consisting of laws, administrative regulations, or organizational plans.
The platform is being established and tested in several pilot projects by a consortium managed by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). Other partners include the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE, the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems FOKUS, the University of Darmstadt, the German Red Cross of Rhineland-Palatinate e.V., the Verband für Sicherheitstechnik e.V., Advancis Software & Services GmbH, ISE Informatikges. für Software-Entwicklung mbH, LiveReader GmbH, Corevas GmbH & Co. KG, apheris AI GmbH and BASF SE, AP/CM.
From October 1 to 3, 2021, the consortium invites participants to the “Hackathon am Ring” at the Nürburgring motorsports complex to facilitate the development of an application-oriented and open implementation of the SPELL platform. The hackathon will consist of several challenges, and Empolis will present two of them, both of which deal with crisis situations: The first aims to ensure that all involved persons consistently receive the necessary information to make the right decisions as independently as possible, in the case of imminent emergency. The other challenge concerns the coordination of emergency personnel from different organizations to better coordinate their efforts to when and where they are needed most. It is also important during a crisis that operations managers be kept informed about who is performing which tasks and during which periods of time.
For more information, see: https://hackathonamring.de/