Detecting potential events that could impact supply chains in Canada using crowd sourced data and natural language processing

Transport Canada Customer Insight Application Deployment

Global events can cause positive or negative impacts on global supply chains which could result in major disruptions. In search of a better solution to identify such events and their impacts early, Transport Canada’s Innovation Centre reached out to the Government of Canada Innovation Solutions department, who had recognized Stantec’s CommunityHQ™ as an innovation that can be tested and used by federal agencies.

We configured and deployed CommunityHQ so that Transport Canada could leverage the power of advanced analytics, natural language processing, and sentiment analytics in the transportation sector. CommunityHQ uses a keyword search track comprising of important transportation assets to fetch relevant crowd sourced data in real-time from novel sources such as social media platforms, online news sources, and blogs. This data is processed using CommunityHQ’s intelligent event detection, text classification, analysis, and monitoring algorithms to generate information that can help Transport Canada identify and stay updated on events that could critically affect supply chains and the transportation sector.

The successful deployment of CommunityHQ for Transport Canada demonstrated an increase in data gathering reach and resulted in a significant reduction in event detection time when compared to the lagging indicators used previously.