The cloud migration with AI to safeguard fisheries

Summary:

Generative AI is boosting productivity for a European maritime department as it transitions its IT applications to the cloud.

Client: 

The Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries (DG MARE) is the European Commission department that is responsible for the policy area of fisheries, the Law of the Sea and Maritime Affairs.

Problem Statement: 

Approximately 20% of the global fishing catch is illegal, resulting in billions of dollars in losses for coastal nations each year. DG MARE aims to enhance its mission’s efficiency and speed by utilizing AI algorithms to detect illegal fishing in European waters by analyzing data on catches of endangered species, information from ship logbooks, and geolocation of vessels. 

Results: 

• Refactoring of each rule in just one minute with 90% accuracy. Developers only need to validate the code and occasionally correct any inaccuracies.
• Increased productivity enables the department to dedicate more time to exploring analytics solutions.
• The AI tool enhances the department’s agility in data-driven decision-making.

AI Solution Overview:

Accenture is facilitating the transformation by migrating DG MARE’s existing IT applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform. As part of this collaboration, Accenture’s Data and AI Studio for Public Service in Europe is assisting DG MARE in leveraging generative AI to reduce development time.

DG MARE’s IT applications manage a wide array of data, including fishing vessel locations and fish catch declarations from the 27 European Union member states and non-member third-party countries. Historically, these applications and their data have been siloed, posing challenges for DG MARE in cross-referencing and analyzing different data sets to enforce policies and provide transparency to EU citizens. The cloud migration results in a unified platform, called Ocean Store, which integrates all data from the legacy applications.

One legacy application, a business rule engine, manages and executes over 2,000 business rules. These rules ensure the accuracy and completeness of data submitted by member states and third countries to DG MARE. For instance, the rule engine verifies that incoming data on fish catches is associated with a specific month, and if not, it instructs the country on how to correct the data before acceptance.

The cloud migration necessitates rewriting the legacy code for the 2,000 rules to fully utilize cloud services. This “refactoring” process is time-consuming, estimated to take human developers 12,000 person-days. A generative AI tool employs large language models to understand the rules’ logic and automatically generate new, cloud-ready code. A unique feature of the tool is its use of DG MARE’s existing codebase and documentation, which ensures the production of high-quality code.

References: 

1. Harnessing AI to safeguard fisheries. https://www.accenture.com/us-en/case-studies/public-service/harnessing-ai-safeguard-fisheries
2. Accenture and AWS Collaborate to Help Clients Accelerate Adoption of Amazon Q’s Advanced Generative AI Technology. https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/2023/accenture-and-aws-collaborate-to-help-clients-accelerate-adoption-of-amazon-q-advanced-generative-ai-technology

Industry: Public Services

Vendor: Accenture

Client: The Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries (DG MARE)

Publication Date: 2023