Google Summer of Code 2025 Mentor Summit
52°North has been participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for many years now. This year we mentored two projects, one in the context of KomMonitor and the other in the context of our Weather Routing Tool.
Civil protection exercise in the event of a floodThe DIRECTED project’s second General Assembly recently took place in Rimini, Italy. It was organized by the project partners GECOsistema, ARSTPC Emilia-Romagna (agenzia regionale per la sicurezza territoriale e la protezione civile) and ARPAE Emilia-Romagna (agenzia regionale prevenzione ambiente energia) and provided deep insights into the challenges and requirements of the Emilia-Romagna region Real World Lab. We also consolidated the road maps for all four Real World Labs and discussed general project issues.
The first two days of the General Assembly were designed as a “Civil Protection Exercise” simulating a real disaster event.
Hot spot analysis is a statistical tool to identify clusters in a dataset. In traffic management, identifying hot spots of $\text{CO}_2$ emissions might help to define measures for an overall reduction of emissions, e.g. by optimizing traffic light circuits in a hot spot. In the CITRAM project (Citizen Science for Traffic Management), citizens in three German cities (Chemnitz, Hamm and Krefeld) used the enviroCar App to collect extended floating car data (xFCD). The goal of the project was to understand how citizen science tools can contribute to improve traffic quality (e.g. efficient traffic flow, reduction of fuel consumption and emissions).
The enviroCar platform offers a broad range of data about traffic that can be used by different stakeholder groups. Fuel consumption is of special interest, e.g. when trying to understand the environmental impact of traffic or when trying to minimize fuel consumption by individual drivers. In enviroCar, there are currently two models to calculate fuel consumption: 1) using motor data from the on-board diagnostics (OBD) and 2) using GPS data from mobile phones running the enviroCar app.