Promoting and rewarding collaboration in research, even among young scientists: This is what the emergenCITY Collaboration Award is about. The internal prize honours emergenCITY publications that follow an interdisciplinary approach and involve researchers from different disciplines. The prize was recently awarded for the third time during this year’s emergenCITY Week.

First prize went to Martin Pietsch, research assistant at the Energy Information Networks & Systems Lab at TU Darmstadt, and Jan-Philipp Stroscher, research assistant at the Department of Public Law, IT Law and Environmental Law at the University of Kassel, this year. Together with Anna Stöckl and under the supervision of emergenCITY PIs Michèle Knodt, Florian Steinke and Gerrit Hornung, they published the article “Power blackout: Citizens’ contribution to strengthen urban resilience” in the Energy Policy Journal investigating the willingness of local populations to share their electricity in the event of a large-scale and prolonged power blackout. Using local survey data from the city of Darmstadt, the researchers found a majority of residents willing to contribute to the urban resilience of their city through participatory elements in the event of a crisis.

Second place went again to Martin Pietsch as well as Maximilian Bauer from the Institute of Flight Systems and Automatic Control at TU Darmstadt and Burak Yilmaz from the Communications Engineering Lab at TU Darmstadt. Their paper “Optimised UAV Placement for Resilient Crisis Communication and Power Grid Restoration” investigates how mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) generated by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can contribute to power grid restoration in addition to establishing an emergency communication network. Together with Michael Heise and emergenCITY PI Florian Steinke, they therefore evaluated simulation results using an accelerated feasibility query algorithm (FQA).

emergenCITY warmly congratulates the award winners and those involved in the respective publications on their achievements.