Creative minds develop new ideas for Colibri product – literally overnight

A hackathon (from "hack" and "marathon") is an event at which teams work together under time pressure to find solutions to challenges and is a method used by companies around the world to generate new ideas and overcome operational blindness. No easy task. Of the 180 creative minds present at the start of the eighth DB Hackathon, held on 15 December and into the following day, almost 50 were still going strong beyond 4 am. Some of them dedicated themselves to tackling the task set by DB Fahrzeuginstandhaltung to find a way to count passengers, bicycles and objects by means of cameras on board trains and based on Colibri data. Colibri combines IT systems from along the entire travel chain to improve customer satisfaction and profitability.

The event was a definite success for DB Fahrzeuginstandhaltung. By the end, a prototype for counting people and bikes had been created, which can be further developed for use in everyday practice, with the addition of feedback on the data collected and any other input required. "The hackathon really helped us to get a feeling for the quality of our data collection and which approaches we should continue to focus on," said Melvin Zinngrebe, Head of IT on Trains department of DB Fahrzeuginstandhaltung. "The proof of concept, which was realised in just 24 hours, has shown us that it is possible to count people, bicycles