History of RAMMS

In 2005, Perry Bartelt, Urs Gruber and Marc Christen started to think about a new, user-friendly graphical user interface for our 2D-avalanche code. The forerunner of RAMMS, AVAL-2D, was also developed at SLF, and used for 2D avalanche simulations, see video below. The visualization was then done by Xlib on Unix Systems, and was far from user-friendly, as you can imagine.

The first prototyp of RAMMS at the beginning of 2006 looked like the screenshot below. In the following years, we worked hard on the new RAMMS visualization, for the avalanche module.

In parallel, we were already thinking about a ROCKFALL module. The rocks were still spheres, using restitution coefficients.

In the meantime, we were doing experiments in Vallée de la Sionne, and Perry started to draw his first ideas of random kinetic energy (RKE) models.

Over the last years, we held many RAMMS workshops all around the world. Alaska, Svalbard, Italy, Russia and Norway are some of the countries we could visit. In 2012, we organized a 4-day RAMMS workshop in Davos.