Introducing the EUMigraTool (EMT)

The EMT is a solution-oriented tool for civil society and local authorities with two main functions:

(I) Predicting arrivals of asylum seekers

(II) Detecting attitudes and potential tensions related to migration and asylum

The backend of EMT comprises two complementary approaches to:

Simulation

The Small-Scale Model (SSM) aims to predict the distribution of incoming asylum-seekers/unrecognised refugees arriving to neighbouring countries of conflict origins. It uses a generalised and automated simulation development approach and the Flee agent-based simulation code, which is optimised for simplicity and flexibility. The SSM synthesises data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), OpenStreetMap and population data using the City Population database or other population sources. The conflict model is constructed, run and validated by comparing the simulation results to the existing camp registrations obtained from UNHCR. 

Forecasting

The Large-Scale Model (LSM) produces monthly predictions of asylum applications in the EU for a variety of bilateral (i.e., from country of origin to the EU Member State) cases. It uses state of the art machine learning approaches, including neural network architectures and time series analysis. Its techniques allow for correlation analysis between raw data sources and simulation. Furthermore, the LSM provides intuitions on attitudes towards migration among populations in all European destination countries, using the Twitter Sentiment Analysis model data as input, and the most influential or relevant determinants of attitudes towards migration. The LSM combines a set of different inputs and methods from Topic Modeling by monitoring national press and asylum seeker data from Eurostat (the official EU statistics office). 

The EMT detects and identifies needs among migrants, including refugees, prior to their arrival in Europe helping end-users predict the number, gender and age range of asylum seekers/non-recognised refugees entering several countries of the EU, as well as showing real-time information regarding the camps, some major cities and the conflict zones in non-EU countries.

EMT is able to account for entry quote when forecasting migratory flows, having a real number of migrants, including refugees, arriving to a particular country and region, helping NGOs understand the human effort and material resources that need to be allocated in that particular territory before the arrival.

Would you like to find out more about ITFLOWS?

Check out this short video of how the project will help in managing migration flows to the EU!