Survey instrument for measuring level of preparedness amongst healthcare personnel in radiation emergency

Drills and exercises are globally practiced to investigate the level of preparedness towards disaster events. However, these activities are rarely conducted because they require substantial investment, specifically to budget and time. A self-reported survey may serve as an alternative approach, although it may not be as effective as drills and exercises. As part of the survey development process, this article discusses preliminary validation of a survey instrument to measure the level of preparedness towards radiation emergency amongst healthcare personnel. Prior to this validation process, extensive literature reviews pointed out that the instrument consists of three constructs of preparedness, namely readiness, willingness, and ability. A total of seven subject matter experts were invited to judge the contents for verification purposes. Randolph Kappa analysis was then conducted to analyse their judgment to allow irrelevant items to be filtered from the rest prior to any improvements. Initially, the survey instrument consisted of 69 items; however, the analysis omitted 16 of them. The following values for each preparedness construct were: Readiness (0.77), Willingness (0.70), and Ability (0.73). These findings indicate that contents of the instrument are valid. Further analysis should be fulfilled to complete validation process to ensure its practicality prior to using it as an evaluation tool

Integrating heterogeneous distributed COTS discrete-event simulation packages: An emerging standards-based approach

This paper reports on the progress made toward the emergence of standards to support the integration of heterogeneous discrete-event simulations (DESs) created in specialist support tools called commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) discrete-event simulation packages (CSPs). The general standard for heterogeneous integration in this area has been developed from research in distributed simulation and is the IEEE 1516 standard The High Level Architecture (HLA). However, the specific needs of heterogeneous CSP integration require that the HLA is augmented by additional complementary standards. These are the suite of CSP interoperability (CSPI) standards being developed under the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO-http://www.sisostds.org) by the CSPI Product Development Group (CSPI-PDG). The suite consists of several interoperability reference models (IRMs) that outline different integration needs of CSPI, interoperability frameworks (IFs) that define the HLA-based solution to each IRM, appropriate data exchange representations to specify the data exchanged in an IF, and benchmarks termed CSP emulators (CSPEs). This paper contributes to the development of the Type I IF that is intended to represent the HLA-based solution to the problem outlined by the Type I IRM (asynchronous entity passing) by developing the entity transfer specification (ETS) data exchange representation. The use of the ETS in an illustrative case study implemented using a prototype CSPE is shown. This case study also allows us to highlight the importance of event granularity and lookahead in the performance and development of the Type I IF, and to discuss possible methods to automate the capture of appropriate values of lookahead

A comparison of CMB- and HLA-based approaches to type I interoperability reference model problems for COTS-based distributed simulation

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) simulation packages (CSPs) are software used by many simulation modellers to build and experiment with models of various systems in domains such as manufacturing, health, logistics and commerce. COTS distributed simulation deals with the interoperation of CSPs and their models. Such interoperability has been classified into six interoperability reference models. As part of an on-going standardisation effort, this paper introduces the COTS Simulation Package Emulator, a proposed benchmark that can be used to investigate Type I interoperability problems in COTS distributed simulation. To demonstrate its use, two approaches to this form of interoperability are discussed, an implementation of the CMB conservative algorithm, an example of a so-called “light” approach, and an implementation of the HLA TAR algorithm, an example of a so-called “heavy” approach. Results from experimentation over four federation topologies are presented and it is shown the HLA approach out performs the CMB approach in almost all cases. The paper concludes that the CSPE benchmark is a valid basis from which the most efficient approach to Type I interoperability problems for COTS distributed simulation can be discovered

Semantic web services for simulation component reuse and interoperability: An ontology approach

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Simulation Packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry primarily due to economic factors associated with developing proprietary software platforms. Regardless of their widespread use, CSPs have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. The limited reuse and interoperability of CSPs are affected by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of software components and web services. The current representations of Web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging Semantic Web. The authors present new research that partially alleviates the problem of limited semantic reuse and interoperability of simulation components in CSPs. Semantic models, in the form of ontologies, utilized by the authors’ Web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through a simulation component ontology that is used to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (i.e. including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The research presented here is based on the development of an ontology, connector software, and a Web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, by adopting a less intrusive interface between participants Although specific to CSPs this work has wider implications for the simulation community. The reason being that the community as a whole stands to benefit through from an increased awareness of the state-of-the-art in Software Engineering (for example, ontology-supported component discovery and reuse, and service-oriented computing), and it is expected that this will eventually lead to the development of a unique Software Engineering-inspired methodology to build simulations in future

Automatic programming of simulation models

The concepts of software engineering were used to improve the simulation modeling environment. Emphasis was placed on the application of an element of rapid prototyping, or automatic programming, to assist the modeler define the problem specification. Then, once the problem specification has been defined, an automatic code generator is used to write the simulation code. The following two domains were selected for evaluating the concepts of software engineering for discrete event simulation: manufacturing domain and a spacecraft countdown network sequence. The specific tasks were to: (1) define the software requirements for a graphical user interface to the Automatic Manufacturing Programming System (AMPS) system; (2) develop a graphical user interface for AMPS; and (3) compare the AMPS graphical interface with the AMPS interactive user interface

Investigating distributed simulation with COTS simulation packages: Experiences with Simul8 and the HLA

Commercial-off-the-shelf simulation packages (CSPs) are used widely in industry. Several research groups are currently working towards the creation of distributed simulation with these CSPs. The motivations to do this are various and are largely unproven as there are very few good examples of this kind of distributed simulation in practice. Our goal is therefore to create a distributed simulation environment using CSPs that will allow end users to make their own decisions as to whether this technology will be useful. This paper presents continuing research in creating such an environment using the CSP Simul8 and the High Level Architecture, the IEEE 1516 standard for distributed simulation. The scope of this paper is limited to the CSPI-PDG Type I Interoperability Reference Model

Ontology engineering for simulation component reuse

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) simulation packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry, although they have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. Reuse across organizations is restricted by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of web services. The current representations of web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging semantic web. Semantic models, in the form of ontology, utilized by web service discovery and deployment architectures provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through the use of simulation component ontologies to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The paper presents the development of an ontology, connector software and web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, adopting a less intrusive interface between participants. Although specific to CSPs the work has wider implications for the simulation community

Facilitating the analysis of a UK national blood service supply chain using distributed simulation

In an attempt to investigate blood unit ordering policies, researchers have created a discrete-event model of the UK National Blood Service (NBS) supply chain in the Southampton area of the UK. The model has been created using Simul8, a commercial-off-the-shelf discrete-event simulation package (CSP). However, as more hospitals were added to the model, it was discovered that the length of time needed to perform a single simulation severely increased. It has been claimed that distributed simulation, a technique that uses the resources of many computers to execute a simulation model, can reduce simulation runtime. Further, an emerging standardized approach exists that supports distributed simulation with CSPs. These CSP Interoperability (CSPI) standards are compatible with the IEEE 1516 standard The High Level Architecture, the defacto interoperability standard for distributed simulation. To investigate if distributed simulation can reduce the execution time of NBS supply chain simulation, this paper presents experiences of creating a distributed version of the CSP Simul8 according to the CSPI/HLA standards. It shows that the distributed version of the simulation does indeed run faster when the model reaches a certain size. Further, we argue that understanding the relationship of model features is key to performance. This is illustrated by experimentation with two different protocols implementations (using Time Advance Request (TAR) and Next Event Request (NER)). Our contribution is therefore the demonstration that distributed simulation is a useful technique in the timely execution of supply chains of this type and that careful analysis of model features can further increase performance

Investigating distributed simulation at the Ford motor company

Engine production is a complex process that requires the manufacturing and assembly of a wide variety of components to create a varied product mix. Simulation plays a key role in the planning process of a new production line to determine if it can meet expected demand. However, these simulations can be very time consuming and can often take up to a day to execute a single run. This paper investigates how distributed simulation based on the IEEE 1516 High Level Architecture and the emerging standard COTS Simulation Package Interoperability Product Development Group (CSPI-PDG) Type I Interoperability Reference Model could be used to reduce the time taken for a single simulation run. CSP interoperability and the problem of integrating CSPs with HLA software (the runtime infrastructure) are presented. New prototype benchmarking software, the COTS Simulation Package Emulator (CSPE), which is being developed to investigate distributed simulation problems, is discussed. The paper then develops a case study of how this was used to investigate the feasibility of using distributed simulation at Ford. The paper discusses results obtained from this case study and suggests that distributed simulation could indeed be beneficial to Ford

A Web Services Component Discovery and Deployment Architecture for Simulation Model Reuse

CSPs are widely used in industry, although have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. Reuse across organizations is restricted by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organization use of web services. The current representations of web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging semantic web. Semantic models, in the form of ontology, utilized by web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through the use of simulation component ontology to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The paper presents the development carried out within CSPI-PDG and Fluidity Group at Brunel University, of an ontology, connector software and web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organization simulation, adopting a less intrusive interface between participants. Although specific to CSPs the work has wider implications for the simulation community