Objectives of the service
To better facilitate the planning and distribution of aids to those affected by disaster events, this feasibility study aims at creating and evaluating essential components of a system that would automatically collate and make available data relating to flooding events. The end service could then be used by humanitarian and logistics organisations to plan routes and reachability assessments that would avoid flooded roads, ensuring that time and resources are not wasted in the field.
Users and their needs
Humanitarian organisations such as the German Red Cross often have to perform planning and analysis relating to disaster events, in particular, the logistical organisation of aid delivery. In such tasks, the use of data such as flood extents are vitally important, yet acquiring and sharing this data can be time-consuming and requires specialised skills. To aid in this, the investigated service aims at automatically bringing data together in a single location that can then be accessed quickly and easily. Preliminary data relating to historic flood extents will be acquired in the project for regions in Mozambique and Sudan.
Service/ system concept
The proposed service brings together data from various sources into a single location, which can then be used to both share data and to perform operations (such as routing and accessibility analysis) that automatically take into account these data to optimise logistical operations. As well as automatically importing data from defined public sources, users will also be able to upload their own datasets which can then be used by other users and organisations. The system can also be used as a proxy to additional services, such as openrouteservice, to automatically include the data stored in operations, such as avoid areas for routing operations.
Space Added Value
Including flood regions in logistic planning relies on accurate and timely mapping of flood extents. The proposed solution will make use of freely available and systematically acquiring optical and radar satellite imagery as the data source for creating these flood extents. This satellite-based flood processor is mainly based on Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data, which are part of the European Copernicus Programme.
Current Status
The first Progress Meeting has been completed successfully in December 2025.
Within the current stage of the project, preliminary user requirements have been gathered, and information regarding future scenarios where the system could be of use have been obtained. Key functionalities already identified revolve around the usage of data relating to blocked roads and border crossings within logistics planning.
The feasibility of the automatic flood detection pipeline has been tested, alongside the ability to automatically pull data from external data sources and transform them into suitable formats. Through these investigations, the feasibility of bringing third party data together into the proposed system is apparent.
Prime Contractor(s)
