Dynamic Discrete Disaster Decision Simulation System

Collaborations

Ken Sochats, Center for National Preparedness, sochats@sis.pitt.edu
Carey Balaban, School of Medicine, balabancd@upmc.edu
Bopaya Bidanda, School of Engineering, bidanda@engr.pitt.edu
Larry Shuman, School of Engineering, shuman@engr.pitt.edu
Shengnan Wu, School of Engineering, shw14@pitt.edu
JP Lai, School of Engineering, jyl1@pitt.edu
Matthew Kelley, Visual Information Systems Center, mkelley@mail.sis.pitt.edu

Allegheny County

Funding: University of Pittsburgh Research Fund

Concept

Use simulation of natural and man-made disaster scenarios to explore:

• Interoperability issues
• Decision timeliness and quality as a function of situational awareness
• The effects of training, policy, planning, order of engagement and jurisdiction on response efficiency and effectiveness
• Risk assessment

Technical Approach

1. Develop a disaster scenario.
2. Using GIS, delineate the geographic scope of the disaster and extract the relevant geographic features, transportation routes, buildings, population and other important entities.
3. Build the decision models and simulation problem.
4. Operate the simulation and its interacting decision models.
5. Dynamically display the results of the simulation/decision process on a user interface.
6. Analyze the simulation results.

Application

Emergency Managers and government officials must integrate massive amounts of information of many types and divergent sources in order to make effective decisions regarding the allocation of resources in an emergency. D4S2 provides decision makers with an active laboratory to test policies, training, strategy and tactics in a simulated real-life decision scenario.