In the context of the EU program “International Urban Regional Cooperations” (IURC), researchers of HCU´s chair for Digital City Science have adapted the TOSCA toolkit for flood simulation in Kochi (India).

At the end of march an international project cooperation of HCU Digital City Science with the cities of Kochi (India) and Messina (Italy) has been successfully accomplished. After a runtime of half a year, a final project workshop has concluded the results and findings of the international initiative.

At the HCU chair of Digital City Science (Prof. Noennig), the project was led by Arjama Mukherjee, a trained architect and city scientist, who coordinated the research work of the HCU team. The team also included the GIS developer Mehmet Akif Ortak and international urban development expert Maria Moleiro Dale.

Cooperation partners involved in the projects were the city of Kochi, the city of Messina, University of Messina and the IURC program of the European Union. The project had started with the ambition to define new use cases for Toolkit for Sustainable City Planning and Analysis (TOSCA), especially in the field of Flood Simulation.  TOSCAthat was developed at the chair over the past years and implemented already in India, Ecuador and Palestine.

To determine the new use case, the partnership has carried out several online workshops, joint research and technical work in the field of flood simulation and modelling. The main outcome of the project is a prototype module based on Machine Learning algorithms that help to predict flood scenarios in the future.

Unique and innovative about the project was the intense and close ad hoc cooperation, that was brokered by the IURC after they had heard about the potentials of TOSCA. The results of the project will help to make cities more resilient against floods by exploiting the opportunities of digital urban data and intelligent geo-information analysis. It is expected to lead to follow-up activities between the cities, first steps are being taken, and first concepts have been drafted.

The project was supported by IURC which targets and supports strategic partnerships of cities worldwide on topics of urban and regional development.