Validation and Evaluation of Emergency Response Plans through Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation

Biological emergency response planning plays a critical role in protecting the public from possible devastating results of sudden disease outbreaks. These plans describe the distribution of medical countermeasures across a region using limited resources within a restricted time window. Thus, the ability to determine that such a plan will be feasible, i.e. successfully provide service to affected populations within the time limit, is crucial. Many of the current efforts to validate plans are in the form of live drills and training, but those may not test plan activation at the appropriate scale or with sufficient numbers of participants. Thus, this necessitates the use of computational resources to aid emergency managers and planners in developing and evaluating plans before they must be used. Current emergency response plan generation software packages such as RE-PLAN or RealOpt, provide rate-based validation analyses. However, these types of analysis may neglect details of real-world traffic dynamics. Therefore, this dissertation presents Validating Emergency Response Plan Execution Through Simulation (VERPETS), a novel, computational system for the agent-based simulation of biological emergency response plan activation. This system converts raw road network, population distribution, and emergency response plan data into a format suitable for simulation, and then performs these simulations using SUMO, or Simulations of Urban Mobility, to simulate realistic traffic dynamics. Additionally, high performance computing methodologies were utilized to decrease agent load on simulations and improve performance. Further strategies, such as use of agent scaling and a time limit on simulation execution, were also examined. Experimental results indicate that the time to plan completion, i.e. the time when all individuals of the population have received medication, determined by VERPETS aligned well with current alternate methodologies. It was determined that the dynamic of traffic congestion at the POD itself was one of the major factors affecting the completion time of the plan, and thus allowed for more rapid calculations of plan completion time. Thus, this system provides not only a novel methodology to validate emergency response plans, but also a validation of other current strategies of emergency response plan validation

Global Stochastic Field Simulator

This poster was featured at the 2013 Perot Museum of Nature and Science's 'Social Science' exhibit. It discusses the Global Stochastic Field Simulator, conceived in the summer of 2011

A Framework to Simulate and Visualize Epidemics

This poster was featured at the 2013 Perot Museum of Nature and Science's 'Social Science' exhibit. The poster discusses a framework to simulate and visualize epidemics

Teaching tools, applications, and infrastructure for digital curation through the use of a virtual lab

With an increased demand for digital curation, data management, archiving, and preservation the library and information science community has begun offering new education and training in these fields. A trend in this education is the use of online virtual labs to offer students hands-on experience with the tools and methodologies inherent to these fields. At the University of North Texas, we are also developing a four course education program in digital curation and data management including a course called Tools, Applications, and Infrastructure for Digital Curation that employs a virtual lab component. This paper discusses the first offering of the course; several challenges we faced; and the new strategies developed to address these issues and improve the course and virtual lab for the next offering.U.S. Federal Institute of Museum and Library Servicespublished or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Teaching Tools, Applications, and Infrastructure for Digital Curation Through the Use of a Virtual Lab [Poster]

Poster presented at the 2013 International iConference. This poster discusses teaching tools, applications, and infrastructure for digital curation through the use of a virtual lab

Scaffolding for Digital Curation Education: A One Week Unix Fundamentals Course

This poster discusses scaffolding for digital curation eductaion. The authors will teach students how to perform commands such as changing directories, moving and copying files, compressing folders, and altering permissions in the Unix environment. This will give students some basic preparation for digital curation work and for the (4) intermediate and advanced courses in digital curation and data management offered by the iCamp Project at the University of North Texas

Comparison of Machine Learning Algorithms for Identifying Cancer Types

Poster for the 2014 MidSouth Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society (MCBIOS) Annual Conference. This poster discusses a comparison of machine learning algorithms for identifying cancer types

iCAMP: Information: Curate Archive Manage Preserve

Poster presented at the 2012 ALISE Annual Conference. This poster discusses digital curation and data management capacity building, as part of the iCAMP project