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ITR-RESCUE is part of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and its IT infrastructure is provided by Responsphere

October 2005

RESCUE Technical Advisory Committee formed

This month we welcome the members of our newly formed RESCUE Technology Advisory Committee (TAC). The TAC, which consists of a distinguished set of researchers from academia and industry, has been formed to give guidance to the RESCUE Executive Committee and the newly formed steering committees on technology & artifacts and external interactions. You can meet the members of this committee by visiting our TAC web page at www.itr-rescue.org/people/tac.php . Welcome, TAC members, to RESCUE and to eNews, our monthly electronic newsletter geared to first responders. You can find earlier editions of eNews at www.itr-rescue.org/e-news/index.php .

Responsphere infrastructure serving as testbed for first responders

Responsphere, an infrastructure project that accompanies RESCUE, is moving into its second phase of the proposed build-out.  In this phase, the project engineers will bring pervasive IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi to the Computer Sciences and Engineering quad areas.  In addition to the Wi-Fi coverage, the area will be instrumented with a number of sensors including video and audio.

All of this instrumentation is designed to facilitate the testing of information technology solutions in the disaster response space.  Responsphere is a unique testbed that is designed to be an open, publicly available technology testing and verification platform.  The engineers responsible for creating Responsphere have made it a design priority that the infrastructure support technology infusions from a wide variety of vendors, manufacturers, and designers.  The infrastructure supports standardized protocols and an open systems approach to technology design.

In addition to the instrumentation, Responsphere designers create and implement custom evacuation drills and create data sets based on these drills.  These drills can be unannounced or announced and range from a single building floor to a multi-building, large-scale evacuation.  The data sets collected from the drill (people counts, evacuation timings, sociological observations, audio, video, RFID, location-awareness) can be used to calibrate simulations (see the DrillSim article below), aid in disaster response research, and aid in designing/reviewing disaster response plans.

On September 22, 2005, the Responsphere infrastructure team was pleased to conduct the first drill in the newly instrumented Cal-IT2 building.  This occasion marks the first occurrence of a drill completely planned and conducted by the team.   While there were a number of lessons learned from the event, the drill went smoothly and many information-rich data sets emerged.  The team is busily post-processing these data sets and working on a number of ways to represent the data to the larger disaster research community.

For more information on Responsphere, or to become a technology affiliate of Responsphere, please visit the website at www.responsphere.org .

DrillSim simulator aids in disaster response

DrillSim is a multi-agent disaster response simulator which, along with Responsphere, serves as a testbed for evaluating IT solutions developed for aiding disaster response. The simulator models these different response activities such as evacuation, medical triage, etc. at both macro and micro level and the information flow between different entities in the system. Models, technologies, decisions and solutions are injected at interface points between these activities in the simulator or at specific junctures in the information flow to study the effectiveness of solutions/decisions in the response process. Such an activity-based simulator consists of: (a) different models that drive the activity, (b) entities that drive the simulation and (c) information that flows between different components. Models represent the spatial information, the scenario (location of entities, movement, etc.) as it is being played out, the crisis and its effect as it occurs, and the activity of different agents in the system as they take decisions. The entities of the simulator include agents, which might represent (or be) civilians, response personnel, etc., communication devices, sensing technology and resources (such as equipment, buildings, etc.).

To add further realism into the activity, the simulation will be integrated into a real-world instrumented framework, the UCI Responsphere Infrastructure, that can capture physical reality during the event and activity as it occurs. Sensed information of the physical world will be fed into the simulator to update the simulation and hence calibrate the activities at different stages. Such integration will also allow humans to assume specific roles in the multi-agent simulator, e.g., a floor warden in an evacuation process, and capture decisions made by humans (citizens, response personnel) involved in the response process. The integration will therefore extend the scope of the simulation framework to capture the virtual and physical drills and merge them into an augmented reality framework.