Enhanced Situational Awareness: Application of DDDAS Concepts to Emergency and Disaster Management

We describe a prototype emergency and disaster information system designed and implemented using DDDAS concepts. The system is designed to use real-time cell phone calling data from a geographical region, including calling activity – who calls whom, call duration, services in use, and cell phone location information – to provide enhanced situational awareness for managers in emergency operations centers (EOCs) during disaster events. Powered-on cell phones maintain contact with one or more within-range cell towers so as to receive incoming calls. Thus, location data about all phones in an area are available, either directly from GPS equipped phones, or by cell tower, cell sector, distance from tower and triangulation methods. This permits the cell phones of a geographical region to serve as an ad hoc mobile sensor net, measuring the movement and calling patterns of the population. A prototype system, WIPER, serves as a test bed to research open DDDAS design issues, including dynamic validation of simulations, algorithms to interpret high volume data streams, ensembles of simulations, runtime execution, middleware services, and experimentation frameworks [1].