The MIKE Cloud Hack 2019 outcome: Inspiring solutions

Reflecting on the three days of analysing customer needs and developing innovative solutions, the conclusion is clear; the MIKE Cloud Hack 2019 was very rewarding and insightful. Putting the customers’ needs in the centre and empathising with end-users, the teams and participants demonstrated the essence of true customer centricity and bold co-creation by thinking outside of the box and thereby creating innovative solutions. The advantages of cross-functional teams really stood out as each of the domain experts unique skillsets brought new innovations to the table – thus fostering creative solutions and different perspectives to solve the challenges. 

Challenging flooding cases 
During the hackathon event, the teams were presented with three challenging customer cases. Each within the area of flood operations but representing different challenges and perspectives on flooding. The challenges of the first case were based on situations with flash floods, mountain/hilly areas flooding and pluvial flooding. The key challenges in the second case were related to properly evaluating the hydrological situation, the received hydrological deterministic forecasts and the current flood protective volume in the reservoirs. Lastly, the third case represented the challenge of how to enable efficient water relocation and storm surge readiness. 

The creative winning cloud solution
The teams were judged based on their ability to develop innovative solutions, meet customer needs and utilising the advantages of cloud platform technology as well as the DHI business ecosystem in order to solve one of the customer challenges. 
The teams came up with great cloud-based solutions that all had the potential to solve the real-life flood challenges which our customers are currently facing. The innovative solutions included everything from locally based radars transmitting rain forecasts in real time, to cloud applications based on model predictive control to forecast inflows and outflows of dam reservoirs. 

The winning concept consisted of a cloud application using drone data to map out the affected area in order to estimate required resources, time and costs to handle the flooding situation. Using these ideas, the winning team developed a creative cloud solution that addresses customer needs, while at the same time demonstrating impeccable use of different technology components such as machine learning, augmented reality and Google Maps. 

DHI would like to thank all the teams and participating customers for their efforts throughout the three-day event. Well done!