The digital platform will collect, document, and analyze information on supply networks of crisis-relevant goods and resources. During the three-year project period, the development of five demonstrators is planned. They will demonstrate the use of the platform in the supply of substitutable goods and resources, the supply of blood reserves, preclinical emergency medicine, large-scale and long-lasting fires, and in supporting the work of crisis teams.

In this project, Fraunhofer FOKUS will develop a distributed, scalable platform for knowledge-based documentation of supply relationships between organizations and companies and methods for analyzing the dependencies in these networks. The goal of this platform is the cross-organizational, secure documentation of sensitive supply relationships to make them analyzable in the event of a crisis and to identify the critical nodes and dependencies in supply networks.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Hoppe, lead management ResKriVer and project manager at Fraunhofer FOKUS, explains: “The Corona pandemic showed us how susceptible our global economy, which is based on just-in-time production based on the division of labor, has become to supply chain disruptions. As long as the economy is running smoothly, we do not recognize this; it is only in the event of a crisis or disaster that this becomes noticeable. Even if crises and disasters rarely occur, it is still necessary to act with more foresight and to stockpile crisis-relevant goods in suitable quantities, to re-localize production capacities, and to be aware of alternative supply routes and substitute products.”

The ResKriVer consortium is open to other crisis and disaster-relevant scenarios that contribute to building a more comprehensive ecosystem. For further information, please contact Prof. Dr. Thomas Hoppe.

The German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWi) funds this project as part of the AI innovation competition “Artificial Intelligence and Networked Data Technologies for Infectious Diseases and Other Crises Threatening the Economy”. The project consortium, led by the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems FOKUS, includes the Berlin Fire Department, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Condat AG, eccenca GmbH, the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML, HFC Human-Factors-Consult GmbH, KomRe AG, Merantix Labs GmbH, Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (rbb), the Association for the Promotion of German Fire Protection (vfdb) e. V. and YOUSE GmbH.