Markets & applications Homeland security, vulnerability assessment

Background
The use of simulation for tactical-level simulation—whether to support combat scenarios, equipment training, or other similar users—is well-understood and accepted throughout the US military community.

As useful as tactical-level simulation is, by definition it cannot answer some of the questions faced by today's military leaders:

• Where are my large-scale facilities most vulnerable to terrorist attack?
• What is the 'critical path' to maximizing force protection within my units?
• Following detection of a terrorist incident within my facilities, what steps must be taken and in what order to minimize harm to military and civilian personnel and their families while maximizing the opportunities for apprehending those responsible?

To answer such questions requires an approach radically different from the tactical simulation tools available today.

Sample Problem
For discussion purposes, imagine that a terrorist group has released an airborne chemical agent within a CONUS military base. Upon detection of the release, a number of top-level tasks face the base commander and his or her staff:

• Minimizing military, dependent, and civilian casualties
• Minimizing the downtime of affected military forces
• Maximizing the probability of apprehending the perpetrators

Each of these tasks will carry with it a variety of sub-tasks. For example, minimizing casualties will include, as a sample:

• Ordering the use of NBC protective gear as appropriate
• Evacuating non-essential personnel from the vicinity and path of the chemical plume
• Preventing non-essential personnel from entering the vicinity and path of the plume
• Notifying and coordinating with local civilian authorities

Tool Development
To serve the needs of military leaders, 3Dsolve is in the preliminary design stage of a large-scale simulation system, using both particle and crowd techniques, to enable the simulation of terrorist and other critical incidents involving tens of thousands of participants throughout an entire military base and its surrounding area. This large-scale simulation system will be a significant advance in the state of the art in numerous aspects:

• It will include both inanimate particle systems (for plume modeling, water flow, etc.) and animate crowd systems (for personnel).
• The crowd systems will incorporate hierarchical chain-of-command structures to simulate the behavior of military units and their personnel.
• The crowd systems will incorporate communications modeling to simulate the propagation of information, both via formal channels (chain of command) as well as via informal channels (word of mouth, telephone calls, etc.).

Other Uses
The uses of such a large-scale simulation system go well beyond the protection of military personnel and equipment.

A variety of types of critical infrastructure exist which may be high-value targets for terrorist attack. Modeling the effects of such attacks and high-level response could be invaluable. For example, large-scale simulation software would enable the modeling of the response to a breach of a dam, potentially by terrorist attack. A model of the surrounding terrain and inhabitants would enable planners to determine how best to respond to such an attack in order to minimize casualties.