Design of a Bioterrorism Crisis Management Simulation for Preparedness and Response

摘要

A Bioterrorism Crisis Management (BCM) simulation is being developed as part of the National Center for the Study of Preparedness and Catastrophic Event Response (PACER), a multi-institution consortium led by the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) under the sponsorship of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This is the second of two prototypes being developed as part of the Modeling and Simulation (M&S) Integration Framework project, the first of which was an Urban Chemical Disaster simulation (previously reported upon in papers 07S-SIW-077, 07F-SIW-048, and 08S-SIW-065). The BCM simulation development is being led by the Applied Physics Laboratory of JHU (JHU/APL), and involves researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), Florida Atlantic University (FAU), Florida A&M University (FAMU), and the Brookings Institution. This paper presents the details of the design of the BCM simulation, and the scenario that is being used in its initial execution - triggered by the surreptitious release of smallpox in an indoor arena during a concert attended by over 10,000 people. The design presented includes descriptions of the simulation components that will be part of the faster-than-real-time High Level Architecture (HLA) federation execution, as well as descriptions of simulation components that will need to be executed prior to the federation execution. The simulation components include the modeling of transport of the smallpox agent within the arena's ductwork, being developed by FAMU; the modeling of 3D airborne transport of the agent throughout the arena, being developed by UAB; the spread of the disease through personal contact over several weeks, being adapted by JHU/APL based on an earlier model developed by Brookings; traffic flow simulations being developed by FAU, both to model population mixing among home, work, and school locations, and to model traffic flow around hospitals and vaccination centers; a simulation of command/control for risk communication and emergency response; and simulations of surge capacity for hospitals and vaccination centers. The paper also includes discussion of the design issues that led to the decision to construct the overall simulation as the combination of an HLA simulation federation and components run in advance of federation execution, a high-level description of the types of data to be exchanged among the components, and plans for the demonstration of the simulation in the late spring of 2009.