Measured Response: A Homeland Security Simulation
Director: Alok Chaturvedi
Co-director: Shailendra Mehta
Purdue E-business Research Center
Krannert Graduate School of Management
The Purdue E-business Research Center (PERC) is an inter-disciplinary research group, made up of leading Indiana universities, corporations, industry associations and public sectors. PERC was established by sizable grants from Indiana State's 21st Century Research and Technology Fund and the National Science Foundation. PERC enables its members to analyze problems, develop novel perspectives, propose innovative solutions and commercialize leading edge technologies in a collaborative manner. PERC hosts projects that bridge across a diverse set of disciplines, including, Computer Science, Management, Engineering, Technology, Agriculture, epidemiology, and Psychology. Our goal is to create a virtual test bed for e-business in order to:
- Perform research on interactive synthetic environments combining Live (human agents), Virtual (artificial agents) and Constructive (humans with decision support and data mining tools) entities;
- Conduct research in collaboration with relevant government, industry, and academic institutions at the state, nation, and international levels resulting in formulation, development, evaluation, and deployment of new models and approaches using current and emerging technologies and ideas.
Measured Response, a research funded by the National Science Foundation and 21st Century Research and Technology Fund of the State of Indiana, simulates the consequences of a bio-terrorist attack scenario in a mid-western city during a fictitious major spectator event such as an International Music Festival. In this scenario, several hundred thousand artificial agents mimic the behavior of the citizens of US. Over a dozen human players make decisions representing various government agencies at the local, state, and federal levels such as the Office of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, Department of Transportation, CDC, FBI, DoD, the Coast Guard, and the National Guard. It also includes citizens' interest groups such as the Red Cross along with private sector entities such as pharmaceutical companies. The main objectives of the human players is to manage the public mood, maintain public health, mitigate the risk of contagion, maintain orderly movement of traffic and people, and apprehend perpetrators. We use an explicit spatial-temporal paradigm to model the spread of an epidemic over time and space. We use the movement of individuals and the exposure of susceptible individuals to infected individuals to model the spread of disease. In addition to the standard epidemiological parameters such as reproductive rates of infection and disease propagation rates among agents, we also model the hosts and pathogens via several interrelated processes. These include age-specific susceptibility, infection propagation due to the exposure of wholly susceptible populations to newly infectious agents, and population immunity necessary to prevent the epidemic. We model the rate of transmission as a function of population density, mobility, social structure, and life style.
The simulation was developed using the SEAS agent-based simulation platform. Over 250,000 artificial agents, representing the citizens of the United States, run on distributed tera-scale grid computing environment comprising of IBM SP2 supercomputers at Purdue and Indiana Universities that are connected by the I-Light Gigabit network. Wireless handheld devices allow the human players to interface with the environment while being fully mobile. High-resolution graphics displays allow the participants to obtain a high-level overview as well as detailed account of the data generated during the exercise.