In an increasingly interconnected and dynamic world, crises are inevitable, hard to predict, and pose immense challenges that demand robust, effective and timely management. Over the last decade, various types of crises have impacted societies, economies, and environments globally. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019 unleashed a global health crisis with sweeping socio-economic consequences. Further, in 2020, the wildfires that devastated Australia and California underlined the urgency of dealing with climate crises. Meanwhile, the 2021 Suez Canal obstruction demonstrated the vulnerability of global supply chains. While these crises differ in their nature and scale, they all require rapid response and effective management. Traditional methods, often plagued by human bias and slow response times, can fall short of successfully managing these crises. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has created new opportunities to improve crisis management leveraging machine learning, predictive analytics, and natural language processing, among other technologies, to collect, analyze, and interpret vast amounts of data in real-time. This enables the identification of emerging crises, the prediction of their potential impacts, the creation of response strategies, and the implementation of those strategies in a timely and effective manner.
PAIRS is a research project co-funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection (06/2021 - 05/2024) that investigates privacy-aware, intelligent and resilient crisis management. By means of AI and data-driven smart crisis management services (SCMS), companies, government and health organizations as well as civil protection are enabled to move from a reactive stance to a more proactive one, anticipating crises and mitigating their impacts. The project consortium consists of eleven partners from industry and academia that take different roles in the project: industry end users (Sick, Bisping), civil protection end users (THW), system providers (Advaneo, Tiplu, IBM), and research & development (DFKI, Fraunhofer IPA, FIR at RWTH Aachen, Saarland University, OFFIS). PAIRS investigates the application of AI-based SCMS in the domains of civil protection, production & supply chains, healthcare, and energy with the objective to handle the complexity and scale of contemporary crises, ensuring quicker recovery and better resilience.
Partners
ADVANEO GmbH (Konsortialführer), Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. / Fraunhofer IPA, FIR e.V. an der RWTH Aachen, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH (DFKI), Bundesanstalt Technisches Hilfswerk (THW), Bisping Medizintechnik GmbH, Universität des Saarlandes, Sick AG, Tiplu GmbH, OFFIS e.V., IBM Deutschland GmbH
