A Test-Bed for Emergency Management Simulations

We present a test-bed for Emergency Management Simulations by contrasting two prototypes we have built, CAVIAR and Reverse 111. We outline the desirable design principles that guide our choices for simulating emergencies and implement these ideas in a modular system, which utilizes proactive crowd-sourcing to enable emergency response centers to contact civilians co-located with an emergency, to provide more information about the events. This aspect of proactive crowd-sourcing enables Emergency response centers to take into account that an emergency situation’s inherent nature is dynamic and that initial assumptions while deploying resources to the emergency may not hold, as the emergency unfolds. A number of independent entities, governmental and non-governmental are known to interact while mitigating emergencies. Our test-bed utilizes a number of agents to simulate various resource sharing policies amongst different administrative domains and non-profit civilian organizations that might pool their resources at the time of an emergency. A common problem amongst first responders is the lack of interoperability amongst their devices. In our test-bed, we integrate live caller data obtained from traces generated by Telecom New Zealand, which tracks cell-phone users and their voice and data calls across the network, to identify co-located crowds. The test-bed has five important components including means to select and simulate Events, Resources and Crowds and additionally provide a visual interface as part of a massive online multi-player game to simulate Emergencies in any part of the world. We also present our initial evaluation of some resource sharing policies in our intelligent agents, which are part of our test-bed. Keywords-test-bed, Emergency Management, Live Call Records, PCMD, Proactive Crowd-Sourcing, Agents