Decision-makers lack integrated, predictive tools to model disasters. RWI’s disaster simulation software integrates time, context, and people into a single visual platform, enabling the forecasting of emergency responses and strategic resource allocation before worst-case scenarios strike.
Replacing fragmented data with augmented visualization through disaster simulation modeling significantly increases planning speeds, reduces the need for repeating costly drills, and improves accuracy, response coordination, and efficiency across multi-agency collaboration.
More efficient planning focused on populations—especially vulnerable populations—isn’t just a helpful tool. Disaster response simulation enables communities to better protect people and save lives when disasters occur.
What We’ve Done
Unprecedented climate events are becoming more frequent. Municipal decision-makers, utility organizations, and communities need to understand how to activate resilience for infrastructure, vulnerable populations, and mitigation technologies. Without historical precedents, planning requires informed, data-backed insights to de-risk uncertainty before disasters occur.
A resilience and community preparedness pilot project with the Tennessee Valley Authority used disaster discrete event simulation to model an unprecedented cold snap and subsequent power failure in Nashville. The simulation demonstrated how both the grid and populations would be affected by the outage and extreme weather, including vulnerable demographics in lower-income neighbourhoods.
RWI Synthetics modelled evacuation and egress scenarios for a community potentially facing urban wildfires. Through integrated disaster mapping, the work revealed the most efficient and cost-effective evacuation options while highlighting how emergency scenarios disproportionately impact invisible populations.
RWI is testing a web-based, 6D visual shared interface that lets users directly manipulate key variables and scenarios to forecast energy security and resilience events through the lenses of climate and human impact, grid efficiency, infrastructure investments, decentralized energy resources, policy adoption, vulnerable populations, emergency response, and other hyperlocalized community attributes. This research is being tested through a contract with the Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada Innovation Solutions Canada program (ISC).
Whether it’s seasonal sea ice causing transportation issues or the exorbitant cost of energy and housing, navigating the opportunities, challenges, and problems facing Alaska requires both insights hyper-localized to the region and tailored solutions. Investments and transitions are accelerating in the Arctic and sub-Arctic, requiring decision-making supported by disaster simulation modeling that reflects regional context, population needs, and time-sensitive risks. In response, RWI created Synthetic North: a 1.35 million m² high-fidelity Synthetic Twin environment with 15 million data points designed for strategic decision support.
Consumer “behind-the-meter” activities, in addition to acute and chronic climate events, are adding novel demand considerations for grid load. These shifts are challenging traditional forecasting; at the same time, companies like ENMAX Power are considering enhancements to ongoing business processes. We created a 6D Synthetic Twin of Calgary for ENMAX, quantifying and forecasting the electrification demands of the city in 2050, based on configurable and inflectable patterns such as technology adoption, climate scenarios and consumer behaviours.
Utility infrastructure data and networks can improve human and community outcomes, inform emergency responders, design AI-based emergency communications systems, and accelerate evacuation using a condensed IIoT. To validate the potential of Itron’s Smart City and IIoT, RWI synthesized an area of Silicon Valley’s utility infrastructure, created an accurate synthetic population of commuters with behavioural attributes, and then triggered a ‘synthetic earthquake’ to observe human response, infrastructure impact, and emergency response.