The S&T developed the Standard Unified Modeling, Mapping and Integration Toolkit (SUMMIT), a software framework that links data sets, models and simulation tools. “The purpose of developing SUMMIT was to establish a platform that would bring all kinds of models together and stick them in the same environment so that you could put a lot of these models together very quickly to compose a scenario for a given exercise,” said Jalal Mapar, a program manager with the S&T.
Mapar said when an agency creates a disaster exercise it must find and implement different types of models (e.g., for a chemical/biological exercise it must combine the plume, mass casualty and traffic models). And then it must complete the process all over again for the next disaster exercise. The idea behind SUMMIT is to eliminate the redundancy. “Once the models are in the SUMMIT platform anyone can use them,” Mapar said, later adding, “SUMMIT is trying to reduce the time that it takes to develop exercises, specifically the scenarios, and even during the conduct of an exercise because the models have already been integrated, they’re available, they can be used.”
The S&T is planning to make the tool available to all agencies in 2013, Mapar said. Although SUMMIT isn’t yet available for widespread use, it has been used in real-world exercises including National Level Exercise 2011, which tested the nation’s ability to respond to a catastrophic earthquake. For the National Level Exercise, the S&T developed an iPad app version of SUMMIT that depicted damage in Jonesboro, Ark. Participants in the iPad app pilot could graphically see the damage information for buildings and critical infrastructure — helping them visualize the disaster’s impact.
This feature could help participants get more involved in an exercise scenario. Currently during an exercise, participants are told about the damage incurred, but when they go outside of the emergency operations center or incident command center, everything looks normal.
“[Pilot participants] were looking at aerial photography types of images instead of seeing the normal neighborhood so to speak,” said John Verrico, a spokesman for the S&T. “They would see a representation of the area where some of the structures were color coded based on the amount of damage they had, they could zoom in and there was rubble instead of the structure itself.”
Mapar said the S&T hopes to incorporate additional features for National Level Exercise 2012, including making the iPad app interactive. Users would be able to indicate impacted areas, like damaged roads, in the SUMMIT platform and the information would be updated in the system for all users to see.
Sandia National Laboratories is the principal SUMMIT architect, and the initial versions of the platform have been deployed at FEMA’s National Exercise and Simulation Center, according to the DHS.
After SUMMIT is fully deployed next year, Mapar said it could be used in real-world response operations. “Because we can do what-if analysis during real-time operations, we can go back and look at various options in terms of response to an event and offer that to the incident commanders on the ground.”
