The Corona-virus outbreak is continuing to spread. By beginning of February, the number of infected people surpasses 42,000 infections, and the death toll continues to rise. As authorities and responders are struggling to contain the spread, news about mass quarantine camps or shortages of personal protective equipment threaten the health systems globally, fueled by rumors and mis-information. The disruptions of (medical) supply chains, the lack of capacity to treat patients and the spread of rumours fuel an atmosphere of uncertainty and mistrust, hampering an effective response. While traditional models of disease outbreaks largely focus on infection rates, new methods are needed to integrate behaviour from the bottom up, and integrated in macro-level models to coordinate the response world-wide.

ReMuNet identifies and signals disruptive events and assesses their impact on multimodal transport corridors. It reacts quickly and seamlessly upon disruptive events in real-time. It supports TMS-providers to improve route planning resilience. ReMuNet communicates alternative, pre-defined, multimodal transport routes to logistics operators and subsequently to truck drivers, locomotive drivers and barge captains. Through this, it enables a faster and adaptive multimodal network response. ReMuNet orchestrates route utilization, suggests transshipment points and optimizes capacity allocation, minimizing damage and shortening the recovery time. What is ReMuNets core objective? As trailblazer for the Physical Internet, ReMuNet pursues the vision to enable and incentivize synchro-modal relay-transport on European rail, road, and inland waterways to increase the holistic network resilience. It significantly reduces emissions and boosts freight transport corridor efficiency in case of disruptive events. How will ReMuNet achieve this? 1. A standardized method to describe multimodal transport networks. The proposed standard is derived from existing approaches and developed together with critical stakeholders to ensure Europe-wide practicability and acceptance 2. An algorithm capable of calculating multimodal route alternatives and capacity utilization in the face of disruptive events. It uses real-time data for dynamic synchromodal alternative route planning 3. A collaborative platform connecting relevant freight operators and enables them to manage disruptions. This is done by providing secure and resilient digital logistic and network management tools enabling alternative route planning information and orchestrating event-based synchromodal relay transportation 4. Using Reinforcement Learning to model and evaluate alternative courses of action, providing the basis for a self-learning, adaptive multimodal European freight transport and logistics network

Waste in humanitarian Operations: Reduction and Minimisation (WORM)'s overall objective is designing guidelines and support actions for circular economy in the humanitarian sector. WORM focuses on two selected settings: field hospital deployments, and humanitarian livelihood programmes with a waste picking component. Across these settings, the project focuses on several cross-cutting focus areas: • the integration of bio-based technological innovation solutions in the humanitarian context, • using procurement as a gatekeeper for waste avoidance, and gateway to integrate innovative solutions, • improvements in waste management, and the use of less polluting waste treatment methods, • a specific focus on the sustainable livelihoods of waste pickers, and • policy development, advocacy and a heightened local awareness of improved waste management in the relevant local contexts. Following a multi-actor approach, WORM brings together medical humanitarian organisations and humanitarian organisations with livelihood programmes with innovation and supplier clusters, procurement service providers, logistics service providers, waste management service providers and academic partners. WORM seeks to involve a myriad of different stakeholders in data collection and policy development, including but not limited to, humanitarian actors positioned in the field during an operation, local waste management companies, start-ups focusing on bio-based solutions, policymakers (both local and global), and research institutions. WORM includes partners from low- and middle-income countries (esp. Kenya, Viet Nam) since humanitarian operations are often implemented in these contexts. WORM will focus on these contexts in their local awareness campaigns for improved waste management.

The enduring humanitarian crisis in the Middle East, the unrelenting high levels of violence in Afghanistan and new outbursts of violence in South-Sudan have made 2014 another record-breaking year for acts of violence against humanitarian aid workers. In 2000 41 significant attacks on aid workers were recorded across the globe. By 2014, that number had risen to 190. In this 15-year period, over 3,000 aid workers have been killed, injured or kidnapped. Despite the increasing availability of tracking and monitoring technologies, the number of humanitarian workers that fall victim to attacks continues to rise. Clearly, a novel and innovative approach to tracking and decision-making is needed. Information systems for fleet management, GPS for navigation and location or RFID tags for inventory management are just a few of the technologies that have changed the humanitarian operations. Until now, however, there is no integrated decision support system that provides real-time analyses from the data streams that are generated by these technologies. This lack of integrated real-time information prevents an understanding of potentially threatening situations, increases response times and creates insecure communications, all leading to inadequate protection and hampered efficiency and effectiveness. The aim of better protection and more efficient and effective operations can only be achieved by devel-oping technologies along with the policies for their use. GPS, for example, notwithstanding its capability to provide live tracking of vehicles for recovery, cannot prevent an ambush or kidnapping. Technologies therefore need to go hand in hand with procedures and policies in order to provide useful early warnings to decision-makers on the ground as well as decision support for scheduling, navigation, risk management and coordination. Policies, in other words, provide for the essential guidance on how to use the technologies in the field. This project will develop human-centred technologies that take into ac-count actual real-world practices of humanitarian aid workers, and provide policies for better protection and a more effective and efficient response. Based on principles of Privacy by Design, this project will build the iTRACK system, an integrated intelli-gent real-time tracking and threat identification system to improve protection of responders and assets, and provide information management and logistics services such as real-time information updates and analyses as well as navigation, routing and scheduling. iTRACK will achieve this through an interdiscipli-nary, socio-technical approach, which will draw on the latest advances in sensor development, GIS, secu-rity & privacy, artificial intelligence, information management, risk analysis, and humanitarian logistics.