During the previous reporting periods, a lot of effort has been put into the services development, calibration and validation in order to provide satisfactory results through a set of automated and/ or semi-automated EO processing workflows and advanced crop growth simulation models. BEACON managed to engage 17 AgI actors in the "co-creation" process, empowering the development of guidelines and requirements coming from the AgI sector at global scale. In addition, BEACON successfully completed two pilot implementation iterations testing and validating the BEACON toolbox. Specifically, the results derived from BEACON have been monitored through alerts/notifications that were produced by the toolbox and visualised to the end-users and validated based on the feedback that the scientific and technical teams gathered.
The main outcomes of this process are that BEACON managed to increase the accuracy of the risk assessment by 60% and achieve a 100% acceptance of data rate and information availability. Regarding the AgI process cycle-time, it is clearly stated that the BEACON toolbox could offer a significant reduction of the cycle-time, especially for contracts that covered calamities such as frost, flood, fire and windstorms, where the AgI actors could now complete the evaluation and the compensation of a farmer within a week (compared to 1-3 and 6 months that was the traditionally needed period). For the insured parcels under hail, BEACON offered a more accurate evaluation of damage under 40 days following the extreme weather event, bringing again time savings, even of less extent. On average it is estimated that the achieved AgI Process cycle-time decrease varies between 95% to 70%. Similarly, the automation achieved within the AgI companies level reached more than 90% and could be increased further where the BEACON toolbox integrates directly with already utilized ERP and SAP systems.
In overall, BEACON offers 9 products (Health monitoring, Crop yield estimation, Burned crop area detection, Standing water-flood detection, Drought assessment, Biomass estimation, Real-time and Historical Climate Data, Weather forecasts/ Weather Risk Probability, Seasonal Yield Prediction), formatting the core elements of the BEACON toolbox; those services included: Crop monitoring, Damage Assessment Calculator, Damage Prevention/ Prognosis, Early warning system, Weather forecast, Parcel Anti-Fraud Inspector, Blockchain/Smart Contracts.
