1.  Data-Driven Simulation System for Training, Decision Support and Policy Evaluations (REALSIM)
(Oak Ridge National Laboratory/Budhu Bhaduri) -in progress

Local, state and regional officials need a capability to track material assets and key personnel; to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed and existing local, state and federal policies relating to preparedness and response to disasters; to improve training of personnel that must plan and respond to disasters; to improve investment strategies for dealing with planning and response; and to enhance response ability on real-time decisions by real-time situational awareness. This project will develop a system that will consist of a core modeling and simulation capability that will be able to determine the dynamic movement and tracking of material assets and people based on real-time data feeds to the system, simulate the dynamic movement and tracking of material assets and people based on simulated real-time data feeds to the system for the purposes of training, event planning, and policy evaluations, scale from local to state to regional to national needs, serve as dynamic information repository and as an archive of information, and provide a flexible range of user interfaces based on open standards to provide interoperability to existing and future applications and data systems.

 

2.  Data-Sharing Middleware for Information Dissemination Among Heterogeneous Sources
(Oak Ridge National Laboratory - Ham Hunter) (University of Tennessee -  Harong Qi) -in progress

A key growing need is to provide derived knowledge for empirical real-time situational awareness systems that span wide-area deployments (such as E911 systems in a metro area). Sharing of information to various agencies to and from emergency response teams requires delivery and display of accurate, time-sensitive data for rapid coordination and efficient operations. This project will develop a data sharing “middleware” that is able to handle multiple distributed data sources and dynamically changing data items, to assist in real-time information dissemination across multiple agencies for homeland security purposes. This will be used as a mechanism that is able to “translate” data from different sources into a repository maintained with common templates so that data can be moved from originators to requestors in a generic manner.


3.  Rule Set Automation in Support of Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIPRSA)
(Enterra Solutions/ORNL/Richard Hale) - completed

Responses to attacks or damage to critical infrastructure are frequently suboptimal because the responders do not have critical information, do not understand the environment, are not aware of important plans and lack the tools to guide their initial decisions thereby relegating their responses to reacting to events rather than guiding and directing events along a logical and responsive pathway. Current progress in automated decision making processes and systems provide substantial promise to solve this problem. Working closely with ORNL, Enterra Solutions LLC (Enterra) will provide the design and deployment of a repeatable solution for Critical Infrastructure Protection associated with the management of radiological releases at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Specifically, Enterra will make use of radiological field measurement data from the HFIR sensor suite, along with the emergency operations rules and requirements embedded within the Laboratory’s SBMS procedures for response to radiological emergencies.

4.  High Performance Agent-Based Topic Monitoring (Jim Treadwell, Oak Ridge National Laboratory) - completed

The ability of policy makers to make effective decisions and take action in near real-time during a rapidly evolving disaster would be significantly enhanced if they could effectively monitor and correlate patterns and trends in communications across many media types and sources (TV, Internet News, Web logs, Messages, Call Center activity etc.). This remains a challenging problem because of the integration and processing requirements. ORNL, supported under contract by Psydex Incorporated, will develop and deploy a prototype system that demonstrates how multiple news data sources can be monitored, fused, correlated and analyzed in near real time for known and emerging threats to national security. Decision makers will be able to visualize threats with charts and geospatial views to identify patterns and trends in the subject matter contained in various unstructured information sources. The system will be developed and deployed to a High Performance Agent Based cluster at ORNL.


5.  Southeast Region Technology Transfer Network (Alan Liby, Oak Ridge National Laboratory) -in progress

There is not currently a comprehensive, region-wide mechanism in place to ensure that non-commercial investments in homeland security-related research and development are expeditiously transitioned into the private sector when positive prospects for viable commercial marketing exist. This project will establish a network of research universities, homeland security-related businesses and economic development organizations to support SERRI’s objective of developing and implementing technology-based tools to improve public safety, readiness and disaster response. The near-term objective is to create the SERRI-sponsored network in a small group of contiguous states (Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina and Kentucky), that already share common interests in infrastructure, homeland security and technology-based economic development, taking advantage of established relationships and initiatives where possible.

6.  Mississippi Technology Alliance and Outreach Program (Alan Liby, Oak Ridge National Laboratory) -in progress

A principal SERRI objective is to develop and implement technology transition strategies that will convert research results into useable products and put them into the hands of the Homeland Security community. The Mississippi Technology Alliance (MTA) is uniquely positioned to fulfill this objective. It is a non-profit organization whose mission is to champion innovation and technology-based economic development for the state of Mississippi. With SERRI support, MTA will use staff and consultants to perform assessment steps and then call upon its well-established relationships with Mississippi universities and businesses to manage and complete the Technology Transition process.