Studies on Management of Emergency Service Systems

RÉSUMÉ: Forts des outils de la théorie des files d’attente, de la géométrie stochastique et des extensions développées en cours de route, nous présentons des modèles descriptifs de systèmes de services d’urgence organisés en fonction du potentiel de limitation explicite des distances de dispatching avec une fidélité accrue du modèle et une stratégie de dispatching pour atteindre des performances maximales avec des ressources limitées. En utilisant le terme «sauvegardes partielles» pour faire référence à des règles d’expédition avec des limites explicites sur les distances d’expédition, nous étendons d’abord le modèle classique de mise en file d’attente hypercube pour inclure des sauvegardes partielles avec des priorités. La procédure étendue pourra représenter les systèmes de services d’urgence dans lesquels le sous-ensemble de serveurs pouvant être envoyés à une demande d’intervention d’urgence dépend de l’origine et du niveau de service demandé. Cela permet de développer des modèles d’optimisation dans lesquels le concepteur du système laisse le choix des unités de réponse pouvant être envoyées dans chaque zone de demande et peut être intégré à l’espace de la solution avec d’autres variables de décision d’emplacement ou d’allocation. La nouvelle méthode descriptive et les modèles d’optimisation sur lesquels reposent les plans de répartition et de répartition optimaux correspondants devraient indiscutablement améliorer les performances et mieux refléter le comportement réel des répartiteurs lorsque la configuration instantanée du système constitue un facteur majeur dans la prise de décision. Par la suite, nous étendons notre analyse. des déploiements statiques couverts par le premier modèle vers des systèmes à relocalisation dynamique. En faisant des hypothèses d’uniformité sur les origines des demandes de service et les emplacements des unités d’intervention, nous développons un cadre théorique pour une évaluation rapide et aléatoire de la performance du système avec une politique de sauvegarde partielle donnée et des résultats donnés spécifiés en fonction du temps de réponse. Le modèle général permet de révéler tout potentiel théorique d’amélioration des performances du système en utilisant des stratégies de dispatching de secours partielles aux stratégies tactiques ou opérationnelles, sans connaître les détails de la méthode de relocalisation dynamique utilisée ni même de la distribution de la demande au-delà du taux total d’arrivée et de la densité. Nous présentons des résultats auxiliaires et des outils à l’appui de notre traitement des systèmes de service d’urgence avec sauvegardes partielles, notamment des notes sur les distributions de distance avec des effets liés et quelques lois de conservation du débit liées aux situations de file d’attente rencontrées dans le cadre de ce travail.----------ABSTRACT: Armed with tools in queuing theory, stochastic geometry, and extensions developed along the way, we present descriptive models of emergency service systems organized around and emphasizing the potential of explicitly limiting dispatch distances in increasing model fidelity and as a dispatching strategy to achieve maximal performance with limited resources. Borrowing the term ”partial backups” to refer to dispatch policies with explicit limits on the dispatch distances, we first extend the classic hypercube queuing model to incorporate partial backups with priorities. The extended procedure will be able to represent emergency service systems where the subset of servers that can be dispatched to a request for emergency intervention depend on the origin and level of service requested. This allows for development of optimization models where the choice of response units eligible for dispatch to each demand zone is left to the system designer and can be integrated into the solution space along with other location or allocation decision variables. The new descriptive method and thus the optimization models built upon and the corresponding optimal location and dispatch plans, should arguably lead to better performance and better reflect the actual dispatchers’ behavior where the instantaneous system configuration constitutes a major factor in making assignment decisions. We next extend our analysis of static deployments covered by the first model to systems with dynamic relocation. Making uniformity assumptions on the origins of service requests and locations of the response units, we develop a theoretical framework for quick and dirty evaluation of the system performance with a given partial backup policy and a given outcome specified as a function of response time. The general model, makes it possible to reveal any theoretical potential to improve system performance by employing partial backup dispatching strategies at tactical or operational, without knowing the details of the dynamic relocation method used or even the demand distribution beyond the total arrival rate and the density per area. Finally, auxiliary results and tools supporting our treatment of emergency service systems with partial backups are presented, which include notes on distance distributions with boundary effects and a few rate conservation laws related to the queuing situations we encountered in this work

Making Medical Records More Resilient

Hurricane Katrina showed that the current methods for handling medicalrecords are minimally resilient to large scale disasters. This research presents a preliminary model for measuring the resilience of medical records systemsagainst public policy goals and uses the model to illuminate the current state of medical record resilience. From this analysis, three recommendations for how to make medical records more resilient are presented.The recommendations are: 1) Federal and state governments should use the preliminary resiliencemodel introduced here as the basis for compliance requirements for electronicmedical record technical architectures. 2) Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) should consideroffering services in disaster management to healthcare organizations. This willhelp RHIOs create sustainable business models. 3) Storage companies should consider developing distributed storagesolutions based on Distributed Hash Table (DHT) technology for medical recordstorage. Distributed storage would alleviate public concerns over privacy withcentralized storage of medical records. Empirical evidence is presenteddemonstrating the performance of DHT technology using a prototype medicalrecord system

Making medical records more resilient

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2007.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (p. 72-77).Hurricane Katrina showed that the current methods for handling medical records are minimally resilient to large scale disasters. This research presents a preliminary model for measuring the resilience of medical records systems against public policy goals and uses the model to illuminate the current state of medical record resilience. From this analysis, three recommendations for how to make medical records more resilient are presented. The recommendations are: 1) Federal and state governments should use the preliminary resilience model introduced here as the basis for compliance requirements for electronic medical record technical architectures. 2) Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) should consider offering services in disaster management to healthcare organizations. This will help RHIOs create sustainable business models. 3) Storage companies should consider developing distributed storage solutions based on Distributed Hash Table (DHT) technology for medical record storage. Distributed storage would alleviate public concerns over privacy with centralized storage of medical records. Empirical evidence is presented demonstrating the performance of DHT technology using a prototype medical record system.by Robert Rudin.S.M

Factors Affecting Perceptions of Cybersecurity Readiness Among Workgroup IT Managers

The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in the number, frequency, and scope of cyberattacks, both in the United States and abroad. This upward trend necessitates that a significant aspect of any organization’s information systems strategy involves having a strong cybersecurity profile. Inherent in such a posture is the need to have IT managers who are experts in their field and who are willing and able to employ best practices and educate their users. Furthermore, IT managers need to have awareness of the technology landscape in and around their organizations. After many years of cybersecurity research, large corporations have come to implicitly understand these factors and, as such, have invested heavily in both technology and specialized personnel with the express aim of increasing their cybersecurity capabilities. However, large institutions are comprised of smaller organizational units, which are not always adequately considered when examining the cybersecurity profile of the organization. This oversight is particularly true of colleges and universities where IT managers who are not affiliated with the institution’s central IT department employ their own information security strategies. Such strategies may or may not represent a threat to the institution’s overall level of cybersecurity readiness. Therefore, this research examines the responses of workgroup IT managers who are employed at the school or department level at institutions of higher learning within the United States to determine their perceptions of their cybersecurity readiness. The conceptual model that is developed in this study is referred to as the Practice and Awareness Cybersecurity Readiness Model (PACRM). It examines the relationships between an IT manager’s perceived readiness to detect, prevent, and recover from a cyberattack, and four base factors. Among the factors studied are the manager’s previous level of experience in cybersecurity, the extent of the manager’s use of best practices, the manager’s awareness of the network infrastructure in and around the organizational unit, and the degree to which the manager’s supported user community is educated on topics related to information security. First, a survey instrument is proposed and validated. Then, a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) is conducted to examine the relationships between the observed variables and the underlying theoretical constructs. Finally, the model is tested using path analysis. The validated instrument will have obvious implications for both cybersecurity researchers and managers. Not only will it be available to other researchers, it will also provide a metric by which practitioners can gauge their perceptions of their cybersecurity readiness. In addition, if the underlying model is found to have been correctly specified, it will provide a theoretical foundation on which to base future research that is not dependent on threats and deterrents but rather on raising the self-efficacy of the human resource

Replication and fault-tolerance in real-time systems

PhD ThesisThe increased availability of sophisticated computer hardware and the corresponding decrease in its cost has led to a widespread growth in the use of computer systems for realtime plant and process control applications. Such applications typically place very high demands upon computer control systems and the development of appropriate control software for these application areas can present a number of problems not normally encountered in other applications. First of all, real-time applications must be correct in the time domain as well as the value domain: returning results which are not only correct but also delivered on time. Further, since the potential for catastrophic failures can be high in a process or plant control environment, many real-time applications also have to meet high reliability requirements. These requirements will typically be met by means of a combination of fault avoidance and fault tolerance techniques. This thesis is intended to address some of the problems encountered in the provision of fault tolerance in real-time applications programs. Specifically,it considers the use of replication to ensure the availability of services in real-time systems. In a real-time environment, providing support for replicated services can introduce a number of problems. In particular, the scope for non-deterministic behaviour in real-time applications can be quite large and this can lead to difficultiesin maintainingconsistent internal states across the members of a replica group. To tackle this problem, a model is proposed for fault tolerant real-time objects which not only allows such objects to perform application specific recovery operations and real-time processing activities such as event handling, but which also allows objects to be replicated. The architectural support required for such replicated objects is also discussed and, to conclude, the run-time overheads associated with the use of such replicated services are considered.The Science and Engineering Research Council

Decision-Support Framework for Integrated Asset Management of Major Municipal Infrastructure

"Canada's municipal infrastructure is at risk." This was the key finding of Canada’s first municipal infrastructure report card. Given the current state of risk for Canadian infrastructure, municipalities face challenging decisions for planning the integrated repair/renewal of road, water and sewer networks. Decision-making surrounding the assets in these networks requires data collection, analysis, the identification of decision variables and undertaking optimized decision-making processes. Currently there is a lack of tools available to simplify the decision making process for stakeholders. The research objective is to establish a methodology and framework that facilitates decision-making processes used during corridor rehabilitation project planning. The proposed framework consists of three main models: (1) Risk assessment, (2) Performance evaluation and (3) Integrated decision support system (IDSS). The risk model was developed using a mixed Delphi-Analytical Hierarchy Process approach. The impacts of four main consequences of failure with eighteen sub factors were considered. Road, water and sewer networks indices were amalgamated and grouped into an overall integrated risk index using K-means Clustering technique. The performance model considers nine factors that represent the asset performance. These factors were mapped using fuzzy logic technique to a Customer Driven Performance Measure (CDPM) index. The IDSS framework allows the setting of priorities for integrated corridor rehabilitation and implementing optimization via Integer Programming. Finally, these models were applied in a prototype tool using Visual Basic built on Microsoft Access, Excel and GIS platforms. A series of workshop interviews were conducted with various municipalities to collect the necessary information. Data provided by the City of Guelph was used in a case study in order to demonstrate the model features. Results show that Pipe/road size and accessibility factors had the highest impact on the integrated risk index. The road roughness rating and watermain breaks results show the highest impact on the CDPM index. Optimization outcomes demonstrated that corridor rehabilitation alternatives resulted in a ‘maximum risk reduced per dollar spent’. The developed models can be used by researchers and practitioners (municipal engineers and consultants) in order to prioritize corridor rehabilitation projects thereby easing the challenge faced by stakeholders regarding the future of municipal infrastructure

National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Automated Information Security Handbook

The NASA Automated Information Security Handbook provides NASA's overall approach to automated information systems security including discussions of such aspects as: program goals and objectives, assignment of responsibilities, risk assessment, foreign national access, contingency planning and disaster recovery, awareness training, procurement, certification, planning, and special considerations for microcomputers

Integrating external costs into water utility asset management : an application of the threshold break rate method

The goal of an asset management program is to minimize the life-cycle cost of water utility assets, while continuing to provide the service levels expected by utility customers. The life-cycle cost of an asset includes both the utilitys internal costs to maintain the asset, and external costs borne by customers, the community, and the environment when the asset fails. This project demonstrates how to integrate external costs into asset management through an application of the threshold break rate model, a pipe-replacement decision-model that minimizes the life-cycle cost of water mains. The model is employed to determine which six-inch-diameter steel water pipes in the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority (ABCWUA) distribution system should be scheduled for replacement. The external costs of water outages, estimated through a choice-experiment survey of ABCWUA residential customers, are included in the model, and model outputs with and without external costs are compared. Assuming a 5% discount rate, 6% percent more pipes in the distribution system are recommended for replacement when external costs are taken into consideration. The threshold break rate model is appealing because it does not require estimation of future pipe-break rates, and it can be used even when a full history of pipe breaks is not available. However, data from the ABCWUA may not satisfy an underlying assumption of the model that the function representing the present worth of a pipe over time is unimodal

The applications of satellites to communications, navigation and surveillance for aircraft operating over the contiguous United States. Volume 1 - Technical report

Satellite applications to aircraft communications, navigation, and surveillance over US including synthesized satellite network and aircraft equipment for air traffic contro