Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FOReSEE (Market replication of a cutting-edge FlOod Risk ScrEEning Tool)
Reporting period: 2019-01-01 to 2019-05-31
Floods made up well over 40% of all weather-related disasters between 1980 and 2009, registering more than 200,000 victims and economic losses exceeding $19Bn per year. Currently, the dominating software products used for flood risk analysis are the hydrodynamic tools. However, it is expensive to perform a single analysis and it requires very specialized knowledge. The expertise and financial resources available in many municipalities and water utilities simply prohibits the use of hydrodynamic tools as a part of the day-to-day work with flood risk.
SCALGO has developed a scalable online decision support tool - SCALGO Live - that harnesses the descriptive power of Big geometric Data sets, to provide fast, intuitive and cost-effective decision support to municipalities, water utilities and consultants in their day-to-day work with flood risk and climate adaptation.
SCALGO has developed a scalable online decision support tool - SCALGO Live - that harnesses the descriptive power of Big geometric Data sets, to provide fast, intuitive and cost-effective decision support to municipalities, water utilities and consultants in their day-to-day work with flood risk and climate adaptation.
During the feasibility study we have identified three barriers for evolving the SCALGO Live pilot into a highly scalable technological platform and for creating a scalable business model around SCALGO. These barriers are technical, relating to challenges in handling different data maturity levels in different geographic markets, and to handling many trillions of elevation data elements. But the barriers are also relating to market development and reluctance of potential customers to adopt new technology and tools. For each barrier we have described feasible and realistic solutions for overcoming them. The proposed solutions have been subdivided into concrete activities and structured in a detailed workplan proposed for a SME Instrument Phase 2 project.
Throughout our feasibility study we have shown that the current misalignment between user needs and existing product attributes, combined with the emergence of pervasive elevation models, creates a huge opportunity for defining an entirely new product category providing easy-to-use, low-cost, on-demand and up-to-date flood risk screening.
SCALGO Live is uniquely positioned to become category owner of this new product category due to SCALGOs cutting-edge algorithm technology, originally developed at world-leading computer science universities for analysing and structuring big high-resolution elevation models. A successful introduction of this category – and SCALGO Live – in more markets will help empower local government, utilities and others to reason about surface water in more projects, and much earlier in the project timelines.
SCALGO Live is uniquely positioned to become category owner of this new product category due to SCALGOs cutting-edge algorithm technology, originally developed at world-leading computer science universities for analysing and structuring big high-resolution elevation models. A successful introduction of this category – and SCALGO Live – in more markets will help empower local government, utilities and others to reason about surface water in more projects, and much earlier in the project timelines.