Heat Action Plan Alert System with District Thresholds, Voice Messages and Acknowledgements
Cities in South Asia and the Gulf now have heat action plans, but alerts still travel by phone calls and WhatsApp forwards, and nobody knows who received them. Build a multi-channel alert system that reads weather forecasts, applies each district's agreed thresholds, sends staged warnings by SMS, voice call and email to hospitals, schools and field teams in local languages, and tracks acknowledgements and actions taken.
Intermediate
A small team, or one strong student willing to learn something new.1 semester · 2 to 3 students
7 to ship
4 optional extrasSuggested stack
What you should ship
- A configuration format for district heat thresholds and alert levels, editable by an admin
- A scheduled job that pulls forecasts and decides alert levels per district
- Contact lists by role (hospital, school, municipal team, labour inspectors) with language preference
- Multi-channel sending with retries, rate limits and fallback when one channel fails
- Acknowledgement by reply, keypress or link, and escalation when no one acknowledges
- Deployment as containers with infrastructure as code and monitoring dashboards
- A drill mode that runs a full simulated heatwave and produces a report
If you have time left
- Recorded voice messages in Urdu, Hindi, Bangla, Sindhi or Arabic
- A public status page showing the current alert level
- Integration with an official warning feed in Common Alerting Protocol format
- Post-event reports linking alerts to actions recorded by teams
The problem: the warning exists, the message does not arrive
Heatwaves in Pakistan, India and the Gulf are getting longer and more dangerous. Several cities now have heat action plans that say who should do what when temperatures cross set thresholds: open cooling centres, stock hospitals, change school or work hours. In practice, alerts are passed on by phone calls and forwarded messages. Officials cannot see who received them, and nothing happens automatically when a person does not respond.
This is an engineering problem as much as a climate one: reliable delivery, clear escalation and records.
What already exists and the gap
- National meteorological departments issue heatwave warnings and forecasts.
- Mass SMS and voice platforms send bulk messages but know nothing about heat thresholds or roles.
- Cell broadcast and public warning systems reach phones in an area but carry no acknowledgement.
The gap is a small system that connects forecasts, a city's own thresholds and its contact lists, and proves that the right people got the message and acted.
Inspiration
The Ahmedabad Heat Action Plan, launched in 2013 by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation with the Indian Institute of Public Health Gandhinagar and the Natural Resources Defense Council, set out early warning levels and responsibilities by department and has been used as a model for other cities in South Asia. Your project builds the software side of such a plan.
What you build
- Municipal and health officials configure thresholds and contact lists, and see who acknowledged each alert.
- Hospitals, schools and field teams receive staged warnings in their language and confirm with one reply.
- Planners run drills and get a report on delivery times and gaps.
The technically interesting part
- Reliable delivery. Use a queue, idempotent sends, retries with backoff and a fallback channel. Never send the same alert twice to the same person, and never lose one.
- Escalation. If a hospital focal person does not acknowledge in 30 minutes, call the deputy. Model this as a state machine and test it.
- Infrastructure as code. Deploy with Terraform and containers so a city could run its own copy.
- Observability. Dashboards for queue depth, delivery rate and acknowledgement rate, plus alerts on the alert system itself.
How to evaluate it
- Drill results: time from forecast trigger to 90 percent delivery and to 90 percent acknowledgement for 1,000 simulated contacts.
- Failure tests: behaviour when the SMS provider is down, the database restarts or a worker crashes mid-send.
- Duplicate and loss rates under load.
- Admin usability: time for a non-technical person to change a threshold or contact list.
Suggested plan
- Weeks 1 to 3: study a published heat action plan and design alert levels and roles.
- Weeks 4 to 7: forecast job, rules engine and contact model.
- Weeks 8 to 10: sending pipeline, acknowledgements and escalation.
- Weeks 11 to 13: infrastructure as code, monitoring and drill mode.
- Weeks 14 to 15: drills, report and demo.
Path to a product
The same alerting backbone serves floods, smog, disease outbreaks and industrial safety. City governments, hospital networks, large employers and NGOs need it. A self-hostable, well-tested alert system is a realistic product and shows exactly the reliability skills cloud and platform teams hire for.
Scope warning
Do not send real alerts to the public. Use test numbers and simulated contacts. Thresholds should come from an official plan or an expert, not from you.
Learn what you need on Sefism
- DevOps and cloud roadmap: containers, infrastructure as code and monitoring.
- Platform and SRE roadmap: reliability, retries and alerting.
- Backend roadmap: queues and state machines.
- Docker get started documentation: packaging the services.
- Redis documentation: queues and rate limits.
Get help with this idea
The risk is a nice dashboard on top of a send loop that loses messages. Tauseef can help you design the delivery pipeline and the failure tests. If you are new here, create a free account first.
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