Computing and Communications in the Extreme Research for Crisis Management and Other Applications (1996) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Summary and Findings: Research for National-Scale Application
Summary and Findings: Research for National-Scale Application
Pages 99-138
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From page 99... ...
Crisis managers also need computers to help them retrieve, organize, process, and share information, and they rely on computer models to help them analyze and predict complex phenomena such as weather and damage to buildings or other structures.
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From page 100... ...
For example, when a hurricane approaches, relief agencies deploy mobile communications centers to places where sophisticated computer models predict the storm will strike land. Damage simulations help planners decide where to send food, medicine, shelters, blankets, and other basic necessities even before the damage has occurred.
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From page 101... ...
These unmet demands point to many promising research directions, which this chapter summarizes. They encompass most aspects of computing and communi
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From page 102... ...
involved; the diversity of information resources and software applications that must be accessible; the amount of computing power needed to run models and process information quickly enough to meet the urgent demands of crises, along with the ability to
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From page 103... ...
In the extreme case of a crisis, a system that is difficult to use will not be used at all. Research on and development of computing and communications technologies that help crisis managers cope with extreme time pressures and the unpredictability of crises will likely be useful in other application areas domains.)
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From page 106... ...
Although it might be possible to imagine a single, uniform architecture that met crisis managers' needs for communications interoperability, data interchange, remote access to computation, and others, deploying it would not be practicable. The technical challenge of incorporating legacy systems into the new architecture would slow such an effort.
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From page 107... ...
However, the steering committee believes that such research would have much broader utility, because of the extreme nature of the demands that crises place on technology. In addition, many of the research directions relate to increasing the capabilities of information infrastructure to meet extreme demands for ease of use, integration, flexibility, and distributed performance, which will benefit any application using it.
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From page 108... ...
, Evolving the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative to Support the Nation's Information Infrastructure (CSTB, 1995a)
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From page 109... ...
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From page 110... ...
In these testbeds, government, academic, and industrial researchers should work with application users crisis managers to test and validate technologies under research and development by subjecting them to demands in realistic applications, such as training and planning missions for civilian and military crisis management personnel through simulations and field exercises and, potentially, actual field operations.
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From page 111... ...
2 Examples of narrowly focused but successful information infrastructure that functions on a large scale include bank electronic funds transfer systems (e.g., check clearinghouses) , automated teller machine networks, airline reservations systems, and airline communications systems such as the Societe Internationale de Telecommunications Aeronautiques (SITA)
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From page 112... ...
The object is to improve understanding of what information infrastructures are, what components they should include, how they should be structured, what services they should provide, and how they serve the needs of particular applications. SUPPORT OF HUMAN ACTIVITIES In national-scale applications, people are a critical component humans are "in the loop." Discussions with experts in a number of application domains revealed that although support of people both as users and as integral parts of the system design is of primary importance, this need often gets too little emphasis in system designs.
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From page 113... ...
Users are often geographically dispersed and have widely differing skills. Human-computer interaction technologies that will be deployed in national-scale applications cannot depend on high-performance computing and communications being available to all users; technologies must scale across widely varying systems and infrastructures.
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From page 114... ...
Therefore, it would be valuable to be able to focus weather models on the scale and location of greatest interest to the crisis manager and rapidly present the information he or she most needs. People are error prone, particularly if they are tired and under stress as is common in crises.
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From page 115... ...
· Information management tools are necessary to fuse data from multiple sources, filter information from a potentially overwhelming flood of inputs, integrate it, and present the most crucial information to users under severe time pressures, distractions, and other stresses. These should include a capability to adapt the information management processes in real time in response to user feedback about relevance, timeliness, understandability, and other factors.
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From page 116... ...
This kind of shared perceptual space would enable rapid planning iteration, including simulation. The information space shared by collaborators could include databases, documents, working notes, and other material that crisis managers need to share.
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From page 117... ...
active problem-solving environment for software development of designers, programmers, and application users could aid -quality development of software applications.8 COMPOSABILITY AND INTEROPERABILITY ment is a first-rate illustration of the need to rapidly incorpo~otentially globally distributed collection of communications, ces, and system components into an application solution. The , to gain rapid access to information resources of many differnd, to integrate these resources into the information that each users and networks can help achieve these goals, but there is a Proved ways to use existing resources (including both old, ,uch as city maps and new ones such as the latest satellite World Wide Web)
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From page 118... ...
The Internet protocols serve many functions, such as domain name management, addressing, packet transmission, reassembly, and fault tolerance. They are organized into relatively small component elements, enabling users to select particular elements of the Internet suite without having to use the entire set.
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From page 119... ...
to name Internet information resources, and HyperText Markup Language (HTML) to describe Web pages.
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From page 120... ...
Protocol design principles are needed to guide designers of the protocols through which these services are delivered and provide them with some confidence that a new protocol supporting a specific service will interact effectively with other service protocols already in use or emerging. This notion of composition of information services is analogous to concepts related to the composition of software components.
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From page 121... ...
· Protocol design principles should be identified. Results of research on protocol design principles would be in the form of design principles that service developers can apply, along with reasoning tools that could be used to assess critical characteristics of protocol design, for example, freedom from deadlock and avoidance of emergent phenomena as use scales up.~°
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From page 122... ...
Had the relief stations been using any of a variety of commercial personal computer databases, there would have been the problem of integrating data from those formats into the map-based GIS databases used for command and decision making at higher levels. In fact, many of the data were not even in databases, but in word processors; to officials at the station, that was a "database." These data had to be integrated manually by crisis managers even to yield an accurate overall listing of the locations of survivors, much less to correlate the data with a GIS representation of the disaster area or a logistical information system for ordering and allocating supplies.
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From page 123... ...
6. Specific research efforts should be undertaken to develop generic technology that can facilitate interlinking of diverse information resources.
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From page 124... ...
Without this basis, reverse engineering is required before information resources can be integrated successfully into composite systems. · Advances in data fusion of multimedia information from sources such as sensors, relief officials, and amateur citizens are necessary.
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From page 125... ...
The ability to address this need likely varies among application areas. For example, civilian crisis management applications are likely to pull together components developed for other purposes.
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From page 126... ...
· Active software objects that users access across networks can provide computing and communications functions across networks, provided they are constructed according to a model that enables them to integrate with each other and with existing applications. For example, the Java language provides a framework of assumptions within which new functionalities can be provided as small, relocatable software components called applets.
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From page 127... ...
The need to support longevity is also paramount in other application domains reviewed in the workshop series. Medical records must be able to follow people as they move through life and must remain useful as technology for creating, organizing, and managing medical information changes.~3 Libraries and other repositories for human expression have similar problems of evolving representations and abstractions of objects (e.g., books, paintings, indices)
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From page 128... ...
Otherwise, application users in the future will be unable to optimize specific technology decisions to meet their needs because they will be shackled by a legacy of old information objects and software. The constraints placed on current technical options by the need to maintain access to technologies developed in the past are the essence of the technological hand-from-the-grave influence that currently restrains the evolution of many large, complex systems, such as the nation's air traffic control systems.
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From page 129... ...
Such methods should be applied both at the middleware level and in the architectural design of national-scale applications. Suggested Research Topics: · Research is necessary to specify the minimal component services in an information infrastructure that allow for identifying, finding, and accessing resources, and to develop protocols for service definitions that are both minimal in terms of needs and extensible to allow for improved service.
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From page 130... ...
. Mechanisms to implement these services require, in particular, ways to manage information about how to interpret typed information objects (ranging from documents to data in databases and software components)
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From page 131... ...
A different kind of example is the application that can adapt to changes in the availability of information inputs. Crisis managers must make judgments in the absence of complete data.
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From page 132... ...
The importation of code at run time generally is possible only in programming environments that support interpreters, such as the Lisp programming language and its derivatives or Java; importing code at run time to interface into other languages such as C or C++ generally is not feasible. Thus, the problem of utilizing resources of unanticipated types can be split into two research directions, one directed toward protocols for querying objects and the services to support that activity, and the other advancing work in language, compiler, and runtime technologies.
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From page 133... ...
· Crisis managers have a clear need for better tools for discovering what network-accessible resources are available to them in time of crisis. More powerful search and retrieval mechanisms than keyword matching are necessary, as are solutions that allow searching within an unanticipated application domain.
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From page 134... ...
This will require research. For example, a crisis response application constructed dynamically from disparate parts must continually predict and assess the reliability of each of its parts.
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From page 135... ...
SUMMARY AND FINDINGS: RESEARCH FOR NATIONAL-SCALE APPLICATIONS 135 application need is the ability to develop confidence factors based on the reliability of parts of a system. Assessment of confidence factors can complement other approaches to improving reliability.
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From page 136... ...
Whatever large-scale, high-performance computing and communications capabilities are made available for responding to a crisis will need to be preempted from less urgent work. The potpourri of data needed to help answer queries and supply input for simulations must be marshaled from its many resident locations as quickly as possible, and high-bandwidth networking must be delivered to the scene for transmission of imagery, including simulation results.
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From page 137... ...
The examination of existing, apparently successful network architectures advocated in the steering committee's Finding 2 should be seen as complementary to work recommended in the 1995 report's conclusion that "ongoing research in several areas is still needed before a ubiquitous high-performance information infrastructure can be developed and deployed nationwide....
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From page 138... ...
9. Middleware provides services within an information infrastructure that are used in common among multiple applications.
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