International Real-Scenario Assessment of the HUMAN+ Demonstrator

Real-world Exercise with International Humanitarian Experts to Evaluate the HUMAN+ Project Developments

The HUMAN+ project team gathered at the THW training center in Neuhausen, Germany for an in-depth project demonstration and hands-on sessions with experts in the field of disaster management, representing different institutions like the Red Cross, THW, Johanniter, and the police. The HUMAN+ demonstrator supports the detection and management of refugee movements in order to coordinate humanitarian aid. The demonstrator includes various innovative geospatial layers that visualise refugee-related activities at different administrative levels. Half of the layers are based on social media data such as a hotspot layer that shows geospatial clusters of refugee-related activities, or the origin/destination layers that quantify how many people are leaving a region and where they are heading to.

During the demonstration, the experts worked on real international and national scenarios and assessed the situations based on the geospatial layers provided by the demonstrator. Following a critical discussion the experts highly acknowledged the current state of the demonstrator but provided valuable domain-specific feedback to tailor the demonstrator to the needs for effective disaster management. This input was directly used in the follow-up discussion of the technical development partners, during which the future implementation steps were agreed upon.

The final project results will be available around mid 2020. More information can be found at https://giscience.zgis.at/human

HUMAN+ is funded by the Austrian security research programme KIRAS of the Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (bmvit), and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).