AI for crisis management – four projects selected for funding

2nd August 2021 — Current crises such as the flood disaster in Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia or the chemical accident in Leverkusen highlight the need for the swift provision of reliable information for preventive and rescue measures. The main challenges lie in intelligently linking many heterogeneous data sources and in preparing content for crisis communication and making it accessible to the relevant agencies as soon as possible. Here, artificial intelligence and machine learning offer enormous potential.

The four projects, which started on the 1st June 2021 and will be funded with a total of around 44 million euros, were selected by the BMWi as part of a review process that involved both external and DLR-PT reviewers. "After we had already advised the applicants, we finally approved the applications on the basis of all the expert opinions," explains Dr Patrick Lay, Deputy Head of Department "Digital Technologies and Applications" in DLR-PT's "Society, Innovation, Technology" division.

The department, which has been working for the BMWi as a service provider for many years, had supported the ministry in drawing up the funding announcements and will continue to oversee the technology programme.

The overarching goal of the four projects is to provide actors with new, innovative decision-making aids and customised electronic services with the help of artificial intelligence, for example to coordinate relief operations. This is intended to strengthen the protection of the population as well as the resilience of the economy.

Here are the new projects:

• The CoyPu project (Cognitive Economy Intelligence Platform for the Resilience of Economic Ecosystems) features an AI-based platform for efficient crisis management is being developed under the leadership of the Institute for Applied Informatics (InfAI). It is intended to facilitate high-quality and up-to-date forecasts in connection with crises.
• Predicting and identifying crisis scenarios more quickly and securely in the future – that's what PAIRS (Privacy-Aware, Intelligent and Resilient CrisiS Management) is all about. Led by Advaneo GmbH, the project is developing a learning AI platform for crisis management.
• The goals of ResKriVer (Communication & Information Platform for Resilient Crisis-Relevant Supply Networks) are the collection, generation and communication of crisis-relevant information as well as the prediction of bottlenecks in supply networks. The project is led by the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS).
• Under the title SPELL (Semantic Platform for Intelligent Decision and Deployment Support in Control Centres and Situation Management), an AI-based platform is being developed for intelligent decision and deployment support in control centres and situation management. The project is led by the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).

The joint projects, which are based on consortia of renowned research and application partners, are intended to provide significant impetus for the further development of crisis management and to develop and test concrete solutions for companies, administration, politics and research. They will be funded under the third funding announcement in the AI Innovation Competition on the topic of "Artificial Intelligence and Networked Data Technologies for Infectious Disease and Other Crises Threatening the Economy" over a period of three years.

The AI innovation competition aims to advance the application of artificial intelligence in economically relevant economic sectors, especially in medium-sized enterprises. On behalf of the BMWi, DLR-PT is responsible for the technical and administrative support of the AI Innovation Contest, which has now resulted in a total of three funding announcements.