Towards an Infrastructure for Situation Awareness in Emergency Management

CIMIC Center for Information Management, Integration, and Connectivity

Vijay Atluri and Basit ShafiqJoint work with

Nabil Adam, Soon Chun and Jaideep Vaidya

May 25, 2010

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• Information Sharing across States' Incident Management Systems using Unified Incident Command Decision Support System (UICDS), (US Army ARDEC)

• SoKNOS project focusing on IT research issues for public security; sponsored by German Federal Ministry of Education and Research & (SAP Research)

• Secure interoperation for border control & HS applications (NSF)

• iTEAM (information Technology for Emergency mAnageMent): University-wide initiative to establish a research Lab at CIMIC jointly with DIMACS (Rutgers University)

• The Rutgers University Research Initiative on Cybersecurity Economics (RICE) jointly with DIMACS (Rutgers University)

CIMIC –Related Projects

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• Incident Management – refers to activities to protect life and property immediately before, during,

and immediately after a disaster.

• Resource management – involves delivery of the needed resources including personnel, equipment,

and supplies in an efficient and timely manner. – requires coordination among all federal, state, local, tribal, private sector,

and non-governmental organizations.

• Supply chain management– flow of products, people, information, or money from a starting point (e.g.,

raw materials) to the end user.

• Each of these components of the EM system requires situational awareness for effective decision making

• Interdependencies: Decision specific to a single component affects other components

• Need an infrastructure – to support integration of processes within and across the component

systems– to enable decision makers to deal with complex decisions that cut across the

component systems and consider their interdependencies.

Emergency Management Components

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Issues• Information sharing

– Standards for information sharing – Unified Incident Command Decision Support (UICDS)

– Interoperability within and across component systems – Incorporate current practices – Incorporate/integrate community resources

• Emergency response process composition and execution – Workflow management for emergency response planning and

execution– Rollback, recovery, …

• Supply chain management– Emergency Supply Chain Composition and Verification– dynamic & on-the-fly composition and modification of supply chains in an

emergency – Private Supply Chain Visibility System for Emergency Management– Collaborative Optimization of Supply Chains with Limited Information

Disclosure

Emergency Management

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Issues• Security, privacy and trust

– different information sharing policies, ad-hoc coalitions, private/public entities, different levels of trust, ..

• Semantics-based Interoperability & Reasoning• Data analysis• Policy management & negotiation• Customized dissemination• Intelligent agent technologies, Cloud computing, Simulation

and modeling, …

Emergency Management

Our Path

• Study the current practices and methods used by the emergency response/management community

• Build on these practices and existing infrastructure

• Leverage the research advances /development efforts

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UICDS

• Provides middleware foundation and standards to enable information sharing and interoperability among commercial & Govt. Incident Management Technologies

• Architecture is based on the design criteria taken from NRF (National Response Framework) and NIMS (National Incident Management System) • Incorporates the standards and practices adopted by

emergency management community• UICDS architecture provides capabilities for:

– Collection, analysis, and dissemination of incident related information

– Decision guidance options for emergency response community– Coordinating the efforts of emergency responders

• Current capabilities– Sharing of GIS data– Sharing of situational awareness data (e.g., sensor feeds,

plume,…)– Querying & dissemination of incident alerts/updates– Discovery & ordering of resources– Management of incident command structure– Management of incident action plan and related

documents• What is lacking?

– Process management and composition• e.g., automation of mutual aid processes across organizations

and jurisdictions for timely delivery and deployment of resources

– Supply chain management– Security and privacy– Community resource visibility

UICDS

Weather

Environmental Data

Chemical Plume

Hospital Status

Resources

Sensors

Floor Plans

UICDSCORE

ETEAM

WebEOC

iTEAM

PR2C

SAGEMAP

SAFIRE

Data Visualization

Plugin

Data AnalysisPlugin

SimulationPlugin

Semantic/Reasoning

Plugin

SourceDiscovery &

Query

Data ProvidersData Consumers

UICDS

Social MediaPlugin

CustomizedInfo. Dissem.

Plugin

WorkflowManagement

Plugin

ResourceManagement

Plugin

Data AnalysisPlugin

Extend UICDS (Open Source Development)

Data Adapters

Data Adapters

• Nationwide and international adoption of EM infrastructure will be powered by:– Adopting an open source development model

• Development and testing of new applications that can be: – added to the UICDS as a plugin (e.g., workflow management,

customized information dissemination, information extraction from social media, response plan learning, information source discovery)

• Development of drivers/adaptors for interfacing EM infrastructure with existing and emerging open source incident management applications, such as Sahana, Cooperative Alert Information and Resource Notification System (CAIRNS)

• Development of information filtering and extraction modules for linking social media applications

– Leveraging the ongoing projects in universities and research centers

Our Vision for EM Infrastructure

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• iTEAM– Situational awareness and decision support tool

with semantic-based reasoning capabilities• Resource Management Application

– Discovery of resources and resource providers for incident management

• AMS: Automatic Manifestation System– Customized information dissemination tool

• Started incorporating these components as Plugins to UICDS

Initial Steps

• Need to generate emergency response plans – by taking into account the different requirements,

constraints, situation and context• There is always an element of uncertainty when

decisions about response actions are taken• Need to rollback or revoke certain response actions as

the situation evolves – Different from transaction rollback in database systems

• Physical constraints, time, cost, etc, need to be taken into account

• Need to identify the appropriate recovery action for each response action that may need to be rolled back– The recovery action depends on time, location, policies,

and other contextual parameters• Related work – UC Irvine, Rutgers CIMIC, …

Workflow Management for Response Planning & Execution

• Allows IC to track the status of the response activities, make activity assignment, and order resources

Workflow View

• Information collection, extraction, & visualization– Discard irrelevant information– Integrating information from multiple sources to provide an

overall context for individual incidents or a set of incidents occurring in or impacting a region

– Visualizing information from different data sources into a timeline or geo-political view

– Extract semantic information from the text in incident reports, notifications and related news sources (text, audio, and video)

• Coordination & Collaboration– Negotiating & resolving conflicting assumptions or

information using multi-agent techniques• Response plan development

– Learning from the response actions of past incidents to develop & reason about response plans in other jurisdictions for similar incidents or for unforeseen events based on common features

• Can use archived data from multiple UICDS core• Related Work – UMBC, Rutgers CIMIC, UC Irvine …

Data mining

• Resolution of semantic differences across sources enabling effective information sharing and data integration

• Semantics-based reasoning– Pre-incident planning

• Identifying incident-specific response processes• Identifying resource requirements for each process• Identifying potential responder agencies for each process• Process verification

– During-incident planning• Process selection• Activity assignment• Adaptation planning

– Transfer of appropriate data and metadata across agencies• Information/data an agency needs from other response agencies to carryout its

assigned activities

• Related Work – UMBC, Rutgers CIMIC, …

Semantics-based Interoperability & Reasoning

– Total asset visibility• Requires connectivity and interoperability among the suppliers’

systems• Can be added as a functionality to UICDS by leveraging the UICDS

framework

– Supply Chain Composition and Verification– Complying with secure information sharing requirements

across private and public collaboration entities– Logistics, improved forecasting– Collaborative Optimization with Limited Information

Disclosure– Integrating private supply chain into emergency

management supply chain– Provenance – reasoning about the undesired

outcomes and tracing back– Related work – Rutgers CIMIC, Rutgers SCM, …

Supply Chain Management

• A prototype of resource management component is being implemented

• Built on a service-oriented architecture• Current capabilities:

– Incident Reporting and retrieval– Geo-spatial visualization of dynamic and static data

from various sources– Semantic-based reasoning and inference for response

planning and execution– Workflow-based interface for response process status

monitoring and execution of the response process• Provides an Incident Command Console with 3 views

– Activity View– Responder View– Workflow View

Prototype Implementation

iTEAM

Incident Retrieval and Reporting • iTEAM received incident

alert from UICDS notification service

• Incident alert includes– Address and location of

the incident– Type of incident– Sensor observation data

• After receiving the incident alert, iTEAM backend server invokes reasoning & inference engine for Emergency Response Planning & Execution

Activity View for Incident Commander (IC)

• IC specifies the region for firefighting and Hazmat response

• IC orders closure of SR 42 & 257 North for regular traffic to clear way for EM vehicles. SR746 is used for detour

• Evacuation: IC needs to arrange evacuation of the residents in the vicinity of the factory, particularly the senior citizen complex and school children

• School children need to be evacuated to another school on Flanders Road which is at a safe distance from the disaster site and it is not in the projected path

• IC needs to identify safe places (Govt. buildings, parking lots, ) as shelter for evacuees

Traffic Congestion on

State Road 42 & 257

School500 Students

Responder View

Rockingham County Health Dept. Jurisdiction: Rockingham CountyAddress:110 N Mason St, Harrisonburg, VA 22802Response Activities: MedicalService

Bridge Water Fire Dept.Jurisdiction : LocalAddress : 304 N Main StBridgewater, VA 22812 Response Activity: Fire Fighting; Hazmat response