Knowledge Engine for Emergency Response Services

-Dr. E. Douglas Harris, Associate Dean and Executive Director, Cyber Security & Emergency Preparedness Institute.

-Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham, Professor and Director, Cyber Security Research Center.

-Dr. Ovidiu Daescu, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science  University of Texas at Dallas.

Motivation. Challenges Involved. How the Knowledge Engine meets these

challenges. Architecture. Automation / Flowchart. An application – ArcGIS based Routing.

Organization of this Presentation

Motivating Scenario: Due to an accident in a chemical processing plant or

collision of a chemical carrying truck, a hazardous airborne chemical is released into an inhabited area.

Only few members of the team know the area.

Multiple departments and agencies from different counties must cooperate to evacuate the population and contain the leak as quickly as possible.

Internet access is intermittent, cell phone towers are overloaded and information is pouring from different sources.

Challenges Involved: Action must be taken within hours to avoid

further casualties.

Efficiency of the response team depends on how timely and well-informed they are.

A great deal of collaboration and coordination is required as large quantities of data comes from different sources and multiple response teams from various departments are involved.

The Solution: Knowledge Engine (KE) Automates the decision making process as

much as possible. Aggregates the data from all sources into a

single, coherent source of reference. Exposes only the necessary information. Encapsulates detailed data for further

reference. Ensures that the existing security and integrity

of data is maintained. Provides necessary information as quickly as

possible

KE and iCIT TM together, they can

provide :- iCIT is an incident management tool developed by

CH2M Hill, based on Groove Virtual Office.

Incident Response and Consequence Management With a single, shared, real-time map Dynamically update the data in the workspace. Integrates ArcGIS’s Network Analyst. Scalable as the incident grows

Local, regional, national (roll-up with the same application)

Architecture:

EOC users

Field users

Knowledge Engine

Local Database

E-Plan Web server

NDFD Weather Web Service

Intermittent connections

Persistent connections

iCIT Groove

Knowledge Engine Integrates and Automates…

The process of retrieving the weather information at the accident location for the ALOHA based plume modeling.

Retrieving chemical inventory from E-plan server.

Assumes worst case scenario if sufficient data is not available and continues with the plume modeling.

Integrates the ArcGIS “Network Analyst” for finding safe and shortest paths in presence of chemical dispersions. (currently working)

ArcGIS Network Analyst.

Source

Destination

Shortest path

Source

Destination

Barrier

Rerouting in the Presence of Barriers on the Shortest Path

New shortest path

Link Solver Algorithm by Dr. Ovidiu Daescu and James Palmer