Fertility control in Europe: applications for an overcrowded continent

Massei, G., Cowan, D., Miller, L.A

A decision support system for disaster prevention in Urban Areas

This paper presents the use of Human Behavior Modeling for Disaster Relief and Emergency Management. The authors propose an innovative MS2G (Modeling, Interoperable Simulation and Serious Game) using Intelligent Agents to reproduce a complex scenario used for Verification, Validation and Accreditation of the approach. The case study is inspired to South Sudan situation and to the necessity to provide accommodations, food, health care services, security and administrative support to a large number of IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) over a wide area. The simulator includes camp preparation and installation, air dr ops, logistics network creation while the model includes populations, entities and units as well as different equipment (e.g. cargo planes, helicopters, ground units, etc.

Field evaluation of the immunocontraceptive vaccine GonaConTM in free-living mammal populations

Cowan, D., Massei, G., Ward, A., Miller, L.A

Virtual and augmented reality as enablers for improving the service on distributed assets

The evolution of Augment and Virtual Reality is enabling new solutions. This paper addresses creation of applications to support service and maintenance of distributed systems. Indeed this approach could be applied to devices provided as service for industrial and individual use and could introduce new capabilities in terms of training for operators, control and remote service support. The paper presents a case study devoted to lead the introduction of these innovative solutions in industrial and health care system

Introducing Intelligence and Autonomy into Industrial Robots to Address Operations into Dangerous Area

The paper addresses the issue to use new generation robotic systems inside industrial facilities in order to complete operations in dangerous area. The new robotic systems are currently adopting the autonomous approach already in use in military sector; however, in this context the intensity of operations and the necessity to interact with high productivity systems introduce different challenges. Despite the problems, it is evident that this approach could provide very interesting improvements in terms of safety for humans especially in relations to dangerous area. For instance, in confined spaces, Oil & Gas or Hot Metal Industry these new autonomous systems could reduce the number of injures and casualties. In addition, these systems could increase the operation efficiency in this complex frameworks as well as the possibility to carry out inspections systematically; in this sense, this could result in improving the overall reliability, productivity and safety of the whole Industrial Plant. Therefore, it is important to consider that these systems could be used to address also security aspects such as access control, however they could result vulnerable to new threats such as the cyber ones and need to be properly designed in terms of single entities, algorithms, infrastructure and architecture. From this point of view, it is evident that Modeling and Simulation represent the main approach to design properly these new systems. In this paper, the authors present the use of autonomous systems introducing advanced capabilities supported by Artificial Intelligence to deal with complex operations in dangerous industrial frameworks. The proposed examples in oil and gas and hot metal industry confirm the potential of these systems and demonstrate as simulation supports their introduction in terms of engineering, testing, installation, ramp up and training

POPULATION BEHAVIOR, SOCIAL NETWORKS, TRANSPORTATIONS, INFRASTRUCTURES, INDUSTRIAL AND URBAN SIMULATION

Crisis prevention and management are critical tasks for a public administration. In facts, a complex system such as a city could be difficult to keep under control, even in regular conditions, while respect emergencies it is very hard to finalize good preventive and operational plans. In order to succeed in such tasks, it is necessary to have proper support tools, capable to evaluate alternatives and predict effect of decisions in different conditions. To address such issues, the authors developed PONTUS (Population Behavior, social Networks, Transportations, Infrastructures and Industrial & Urban Simulation) which combines ability to model natural disasters with advanced human behaviors of the population

INNOVATIVE MODELLING OF SOCIAL NETWORKS FOR REPRODUCING COMPLEX SCENARIOS

The development of simulators able to reproduce the social network dynamics and their reactions to events and actions is a promising sector for extending the potential of Modeling in modern scenarios; in these contexts the simulations are usually devoted to support training and decision making. In particular it is interesting to reproduce the web social networks as interoperable simulators with main scenario models. The authors propose an approach for creating models of people and related web social networks to recreate their dynamics during simulation runs, experimentations and exercises. The paper presents an example of using this system to address complex scenarios where human factors are fundamental

Simulation of crisis affecting critical infrastructures and industrial plants

This paper proposes a model for reproducing human behaviors and it is devoted to evaluate the operation performance in case of crisis with special attention to cases involving multiple actors such as fire-fighters, police, ambulances, civil protection and national reserve. The paper present the general scheme and the data structure used to conduct experiments related to cases of flooding and hazardous material spills in industrial and urban areas

LAWs: Latent Demand for Simulation of Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems

This paper provides an overview on the Lethal Autonomous Systems (LAWs) and related critical issues caused by dynamically evolving context. Traditional approaches to evaluate new system development, software review, prototyping and testing are often not really efficient or even not applicable in this LAWs even due to the evolution in terms of social and operational scenarios. Vice versa, it is evident that simulation plays the key role to support evaluation of scenarios considering that is practically the only methodology able to develop and to conduct virtual tests on concepts, general principia, strategic decisions, technology impacts and related implications

AGILE SOLUTIONS & DATA ANALITICS FOR LOGISTICS PROVIDERS BASED ON SIMULATION

The current advances are enabling the development of new solutions in data analytics and decision making in many fields; it is quite interesting to analyze the impact of this approach on logistics providers; this paper proposes examples of these challenges in this context as well as an example of a simulation based solution able to interconnect the different information sources and to fuse the data in order to analyze the logistics processes and support decisions. The proposed solution is based on web services and web application that are adopting the MSaaS concept (Modeling & Simulation as a Service) by using stochastic models