December 2006

RESCUE Community Advisory Board (CAB) Emphasizes Product Development.  At its Nov. 6 meeting held at UCI the RESCUE Community Advisory Board members reviewed project demonstrations of the Disaster Portal, MetaSIM (see write-up below) and the Responsphere truck, reiterating the importance of product implementation within RESCUE. Serving as an advisory committee since the inception of the RESCUE project, the CAB has recently been strengthened with the addition of members from the County of Orange, the Dept. of Homeland Security, the Los Angeles County Dept. of Health Services, the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security, Lawrence Livermore National Lab and The Boeing Company. Following RESCUE’s Reverse Site Visit, held just over a year ago, RESCUE has been focusing on a small number of achievable technology innovations that address the needs of first responders.

The CAB suggested that RESCUE further integrate with the R&D community and into the first- and second-responder communities by participating in conferences such as the recent Homeland Security ARPA Conference held in Atlanta. Users in this community are looking to test, evaluate and transition homeland security capabilities to federal, state and local operational end-users.

Within the next couple of months RESCUE’s Disaster Portal will be ready for evaluation by first responders. This web site incorporates several distinct RESCUE projects relating to earthquake dissemination, family reunification, aid and donations, web search and transportation modeling. As RESCUE moves into its fourth year, project emphasis is indeed shifting focus towards product implementation and integration within the first responder community.

MetaSIM, a series of simulation tools for responding to disasters.  METASIM is a web-based collection of simulation tools developed to test the efficacy of new and emerging information technologies within the context of natural and manmade disasters, where the level of effectiveness can be determined for each technology developed. METASIM incorporates a crisis simulator, a transportation simulator, and a simulator for agent based modeling (Drillsim). In addition to these simulation layers, there are the data and information layers for specific events. METASIM is envisioned as a comprehensive modeling platform for plug-and-play simulation tools for emergency managers and first responders to support response, recovery and mitigation activities.

MetaSIM brings together simulation tools from two modeling paradigms: 1) Micro-Simulation, which is agent-based, where each individual is simulated and 2) Macro-Simulation which is used to model regional evacuation. METASIM integrates a simplified, dynamic micro-simulation model and a quasi-dynamic macro level traffic assignment and routing model to assess evacuation. METASIM uses several innovative concepts to address scalability, such as "worm-holes” to establish connectivity between distinct geographic modeling environments, a “virtual whiteboard” to exchange information between simulation models, and a "unified data model" for centralized data storage and visualization. 

For more information on METASIM, please contact Charles Huyck at ckh@imagecatinc.com