News: Forecasting with AI
Predicting future biodiesel demand globally with AI
Evonik has been actively involved in the Data Hub program of Gründerallianz Ruhr for several years. The Data Hub offers the chance to enter a broad network of founders and tech startups and work on innovative solutions for data-based use cases. Evonik uses this offer to explore customized AI applications.
This year, Evonik submitted the use case "Data Driven Sustainability," which aims to predict future biodiesel demand globally, to identify opportunities for the biofuel catalyst business and assess its contribution to relevant sustainability criteria. The prediction model should not only consider information on historical fuel consumption, but also evaluate current and future binding constraints binding sustainability scenarios. The relevant data is publicly available on state websites and national statistical services, as well as on websites of commercial service providers. Up to now, collecting relevant information created an extensive manual effort, so the decision was made to have a startup solve the task.
The start-up Fusionbase from Munich prevailed during the application phase with its scalable concept based on crawling and connecting data from internet sources. In a project period of only 3 months, Fusionbase (and Qunis, who support data analysis) worked with a small Evonik team to develop an automated data collection pipeline that is used to calculate a demand forecasting model. The model allows users to derive predictions and analyze different future scenarios for biodiesel demand. It also serves as the basis for developing global greenhouse gas savings scenarios which are supposed to be maximized.
The project not only convinced because of its successful MVP, but also because of its ecological added value. The Data Hub has awarded the project with a winning prize of 5000 Euro during the live event “Hands On Data”. The recording of the live stream is available below the article.
In many cases, pilot projects explored in the Data Hub program were an initial spark for further developments of a data-based applications or even the beginning of a long-lasting collaboration between corporates and startups. In 2022, Evonik will again participate in the Data Hub program when it comes to solving a new challenging case.