Computing and Communications in the Extreme Research for Crisis Management and Other Applications (1996) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Application Needs for Computing and Communications
Application Needs for Computing and Communications
Pages 8-54
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From page 8... ...
This chapter identifies opportunities for taking advantage of information infrastructure to support the missions of people and organizations in five important application areas crisis management, digital libraries, electronic commerce, manufacturing, and health care. Reflecting the language that often is used by people seeking to apply technology to solve a problem, the chapter sometimes characterizes these opportunities as "needs" for technology.
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From page 9... ...
Information management technologies contributing to the creation, storage, retrieval, and sharing of information across networks. Components that may be integrated within an information management system include traditional databases, object databases for design applications, multimedia servers, digital libraries, and distributed file systems, as well as software applications that process or manage information.
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From page 10... ...
, formulating a search strategy, accessing multiple sources across the network, integrating the retrieved data consistent with the user's original requirement, displaying the results in a form appropriate to both the user's needs and the nature of the information, and interacting with the user to refine and repeat the search. This system would incorporate both information management and usercentered technologies, and these would rely on a supporting infrastructure of networking and computation.
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From page 11... ...
The relatively more centralized and hierarchical structure of military command in comparison to civilian organizations, however, introduces differences in the needs for and the available approaches to computing and communications in the two contexts. As John Hwang, of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
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From page 12... ...
Many such tasks relate directly to or make use of computing and communications, since important resources for crisis response and recovery include information repositories, computing capacity, and emergency communications links. Two sets of broad goals for using information resources to support crisis management, one from FEMA and one from the nongovernmental National Institute for Urban Search and Rescue (NI/USR)
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From page 13... ...
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From page 14... ...
For example, in the search and rescue efforts after the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, information was consolidated from many sources including agencies with offices in the Alfred P Murrah Building and nearby damaged buildings, architectural diagrams, city maps, digitized photographs of the scene, and reports from rescue workers to map the buildings and determine the high-probability locations of missing people.
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In addition, emergency management personnel often lack the computer skills and hardware to utilize .
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From page 16... ...
The steering committee also developed the fictional scenario presented in Box 1.3, describing a future crisis and some of the means by which relief officials might respond, given computing and communications capabilities beyond those currently available or tested in experimental contexts such as the Joint Warrior Interoperability Demonstrations (JWIDs) discussed in Box 1.2.
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From page 17... ...
Walter McKnight, of the National Communications System (NCS) , reported that a review by NCS found recurring communications shortfalls for national- and regional-level emergency users responding to disasters.6 These included the following: Inadequate voice services; Congested wireline and wireless services; Unknown radio frequencies for various relief organizations; Limited access to distributed information resources; Limited information sharing among different functional branches ("emergency support functions," such as transportation, communications, fire fighting, health and medical, hazardous materials, and food)
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.. Priority reservation systems of this kind do little for crisis response in regions where telephone infrastructure is damaged and not yet restored or has never existed.
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271. John Hwang explained that FEMA can deploy to a field command center a mobile (truck-mounted)
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From page 22... ...
Because of congestion or damage to local cellular telephone networks, local communications generally must rely on fire and police radios, which do not support data networking. An example of a crisis in which initial response teams went into the field with portable computers and satellite-capable telephones (which are limited to
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From page 23... ...
After the initial situation assessment, a rapidly assembled response structure with many people from different agencies and organizations must have the ability to communicate to coordinate their actions. As the NI/USR's Vision 2000 statement9 observes, current capabilities are limited to voice telephony, which is inadequate for crisis information and computing needs; furthermore, the lack of interoperability among equipment of different organizations is a serious problem that adds cost to the overall response all of which suggests that research investments in solving this difficult problem could have high payoffs.
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From page 24... ...
Crisis managers may need to communicate sensitive information, such as personal medical records and national security-related satellite imagery; the threat of disclosure of such information over an insecure crisis response network could leave the owners of information unwilling to share it with crisis managers. Robert Kehlet, of the Defense Nuclear Agency, observed, "When you operate at a federal level, though, you get access to databases and information that are very sensitive in nature, and you don't want to pass that out to the world in general and make it totally and completely public accessible.
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From page 25... ...
Affordable sensor systems for crisis management, however, may not be available until larger commercial markets demand their development. David Kehrlein, of the Office of Emergency Services, State of California, speaking of the need for spatial data including maps, suggested that "10 years from now, when they have .
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From page 26... ...
Forecasting by the National Weather Service, including hurricane track predictions, appears to be among a small number of exceptions as a resource derived from high-performance computation that is operationally available for crisis response planning in real time. (Kelvin Droegemeier described a storm prediction model, discussed in Chapter 2, that has been tested experimentally for real-time applications.)
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From page 27... ...
To date there has been no attempt within the emergency management domain to centralize the needed high-performance computer capability for offsite processing. The product of this off-site processing could then be suitable in near real time for downloading onto the field PCs.
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From page 28... ...
We've got to give him models that show him the value of public affairs, the value of doing news interviews, how to manage the press, how to manage information, how to deal with the customs and courtesies of another country, how to deal with coalition warfare when the day before he wasn't doing any of that. Modeling and simulation are not the only applications requiring computation; all elements of an information infrastructure can be made more capable by increased computing power.
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From page 29... ...
Informing rescue teams that someone they are seeking in a collapsed home is actually alive and well in a nearby shelter is a major benefit to the search and rescue operation. In general, information management is a crucial need that can be highly complex in crises, as discussed in the next section, and it requires access to computing power at all levels of the response effort.
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From page 30... ...
Those who hold data may have little incentive to make major efforts to accommodate external needs such as crisis management. Thus, efforts such as a recent initiative by the Emergency Management and Engineering Society, to develop and obtain compliance with common crisis information standards are likely to progress only slowly (Newkirk, 1994, p.
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From page 31... ...
As Joseph Stewart II, of MITRE Corporation, observed, information management has been addressed in the battlefield context, but to solve the problem there is a need for much better integration of computing that is specifically high perfor mance: Decision makers .
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From page 32... ...
Data and system protection mechanisms, some potentially developed for such applications as electronic commerce, could help implement more rapid transfer of authority to access data, particularly if there were a way to ensure that the data's privacy or intellectual property value could not be compromised by release outside the circle of crisis management. If the need for specific information can be anticipated, certain problems related to location and integration of information from varied sources can be worked out in advance.
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From page 33... ...
Noting the complexity of the organizational management tasks involved, Lois Clark McCoy identified the need for ways to track and control the constantly changing information flow throughout the crisis organization as a way of reducing wasted effort and improving the organization's effectiveness. In addition, the varied backgrounds, procedures, and methods of working that different collaborating groups bring to a crisis response increase the need for clear, complete communications and information sharing; a photograph or map, for example, might convey information with a persuasiveness and clarity missing from verbal communications between people under stress who are not used to working together.
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From page 34... ...
and infrastructural services that enable specific capabilities within other application areas. For example, crisis managers could turn to digital libraries for information discovery and retrieval tools or to electronic commerce for secure authentication and payment services in order to obtain proprietary information on an expedited basis.
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From page 35... ...
Digital libraries require substantial advances in software; information management technology and practices; and the ability to process, navigate, manage, and classify not only textual data but also multimedia, sensor feeds, and numeric data. Digital libraries also represent a primary focus of research in the scaling of very large, autonomously managed distributed systems.
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From page 36... ...
For example, a digital library system may have to identify whether a user is a member of an organization that has some set of access rights to an information resource (analogous to the privileges discussed below in the section "Electronic Commerce". Use of digital libraries will require both adaptivity to changing bandwidth and computational resource constraints and the ability to reserve network resources.
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From page 37... ...
Computation can compensate where individual resources are poorly optimized for uses that involve aggregation with other resources in ways that go far beyond their original design goals. The ability of digital libraries to reuse information resources could support crisis management applications.
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From page 38... ...
users of digital library systems, and to gain insight into how to adapt systems to specific user needs and behaviors. Although much digital library research has focused on "public" digital library services, public digital libraries form one end of a continuum that also encompasses personal information spaces and work-group or organizational information spaces.
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From page 39... ...
Because it comprises fundamental economic activities, electronic commerce cuts across and is part of the infrastructure for other application domains. Thus, electronic commerce can enable the procurement of medical supplies or reimbursement by third-party payers in health care, as well as the acquisition of new holdings and transfer of royalties in digital libraries, or the procurement of relief supplies and the filing and processing of insurance claims in crisis management.
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From page 40... ...
Increasing the bandwidth to tetherless systems is important if services that rely on graphics like those available through the World Wide Web are to be ubiquitous.20 As these examples suggest, there is a trade-off between using information retrieval mechanisms that scale the types of information presented to fit the available bandwidth and increasing the available bandwidth to achieve a higher level of service for tetherless and other intrinsically limited-bandwidth access mechanisms. Of course, some transactions, such as account-balance inquiries, require only small amounts of bandwidth, but the concept of "anytime, anywhere" banking and commerce implies a suitably provisioned, broadly deployed fixed infrastructure and support for tetherless access.2i There are two architectural challenges for networks in electronic commerce: accommodating heterogeneity in the commercial environment, which implies a general and flexible architecture, and achieving security in the fullest sense, which includes ensuring reliable and convenient service in the face of unpredictable conditions (e.g., user errors, malicious attacks, mergers and acquisitions that
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From page 41... ...
Workshop participants also noted that simulation and modeling of firm and user behavior in large-scale commercial systems, such as banking and retail, may help smooth the deployment of electronic commerce applications, to the extent that important aspects of integrating technology into organizations can be simulated and tested prior to full-scale deployment. This demand and the difficulty of fulfilling it is similar to the call, noted above, for more realistic modeling of human and organizational behavior in crisis management training and operational exercises.
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From page 42... ...
As in other application areas, this implies addressing complex challenges in management of distributed information resources, including distributed file and program synchronization and replication, and tools such as Web servers and Web searchers. The extreme heterogeneity of electronic commerce implies a great concern for data standards that support information management tools and facilitate interfaces among planning and design, provisioning, production, and business systems (e.g., inventory, ordering, billing, fulfillment, and customer support)
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From page 43... ...
Discussions in the workshop series addressed mainly this aspect of manufacturing. Among the technological requirements that this perspective illuminates are networked computing and information resources to support collaborative design; virtual reality "test drives" that allow customer input to the design process beginning early in product development, when changes are easier and less costly to implement; and simulating the entire manufacturing process so designs can be optimized to make products that are higher in quality and faster and less costly to produce.
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From page 44... ...
Thus, computational analysis should be applied in the design phase not only to optimize the product's performance parameters, but also to shorten the design and development cycle itself (reducing time to market) and to lower the later ongoing costs of manufacturing and maintenance.
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From page 45... ...
There are a correspondingly wide range of computing platforms from personal computers to highperformance platforms and a range of languages from spreadsheets to High Performance Fortran. The integrated multidisciplinary optimization does not involve linking all these programs together blindly, but rather a large number of suboptimizations involving a small cluster of base programs at any one time.
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From page 46... ...
Using these resources across a broadly deployed information infrastructure requires advances in general-purpose, easily configurable technology for software inte
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From page 47... ...
For example, an integrated health care information infrastructure will be able to give providers ready access to an accurate and detailed account of a patient's medical history. Networked access could compensate for the current, almost complete lack of access to patient medical records in some kinds of crises, such as large natural disasters.
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From page 48... ...
Although the bandwidth requirements associated with textual medical record information are modest, digitization of most health care modalities will lead to increasing bandwidth requirements. The need to deliver the data to remote computing resources for processing and integrating in real time also adds complexity to the management of the overall application for example, integrating, on one hand, the requirements of voice communications for low latency even at the expense of reduced quality with, on the other hand, sensor data that may require low-noise characteristics to be useful.
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From page 49... ...
Computation The ability to generate large databases of longitudinal clinical records, combined with substantial computational resources, will enable statistically meaningful comparative analysis for clinical care and health science research. This analysis could enable identification of medically distinct models and templates to describe diagnostic workups and care plans, thereby improving the efficiency and effectiveness of health care.
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From page 50... ...
Because medical care is an important facet of crisis management, the ability to access patient records would also be of potential use to crisis managers in providing postdisaster medical care. If crisis managers have information about the individuals affected by a disaster, an ability to access their
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From page 51... ...
This situation will change as current practice improves and the health care community moves from computer databases that are largely oriented toward billing to databases aimed at recording information relevant to observing and improving individuals' care and health. The ability to obtain and process large sets of longitudinal patient records would greatly facilitate the ability to carry out meaningful comparative analysis both for clinical care and for health science and clinical research.
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From page 52... ...
User-centered Systems An integrated health care information infrastructure would be capable of giving providers ready access to an accurate and detailed account of a patient's medical history. However, this information is useful only if the caregiver can readily obtain and understand critical information, especially during emergencies.
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From page 53... ...
The Digital Libraries Initiative discussed in this chapter funds a range of projects related to information storage, discovery, integration, and retrieval.
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From page 54... ...
17. The unpredictable timing of such demands highlights the potential benefit of continuous update of information in both GIS and digital libraries, or at least the incorporation of associated information (meta-data)
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