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Leadership (Local, State, Federal and Military), incident commanders (ICs), lead operations response personnel, and emergency operations centers (EOCs) all need timely, accurate and reliable situational awareness to make sound decisions. This is critical both for decisions to be made for a known event that is yet to happen, such as a hurricane, as well as during the response and recovery from any type of disaster.

The goal of this project is to establish a baseline of the decision-making process to include understanding the decision-making paths and the critical factors that influence the overall process. In particular, it is of interest to understand the decision-making process when it involves decision-makers from different jurisdictions, levels of government and the private sector, who may not be located together during this process and who may be anticipating different impacts from the same event. The initial focus of this project will examine the decision-making process for the time period preceding an anticipated catastrophic event that will necessitate a large scale evacuation across multiple jurisdictions. Information gathered during the course of this project will be utilized to develop a model Concept of Operations (CONOPS) to support the evacuation-based decision making process.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are networks of small embedded computers deployed in close proximity to physical phenomena of interest. WSN nodes collect measurements from an array of local instruments (e.g. temperature, position, acceleration, etc.) process them, and transmit them over the wireless medium to a remote data collection station. WSNs have been used in the past for environmental monitoring, structural monitoring, and condition based maintenance. It is projected that in the future, WSN technology will replace all (wired) telemetry networks, including SCADA networks.

Complex biological sensor performance drives the decisions of which sensors to include into the tiered testing approach of a combined sensor system to achieve high confidence results. This includes off-site, definitive lab confirmation, with a reporting delay on the order of a day. This delay can be critical, particularly in a busy public place.

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It is problematic to successfully develop or procure an operational system without a thorough understanding of the intended purpose of that system and without a set of criteria to allow an assessment of whether the system does what it was intended to do. The development of preparedness and response systems suffers from a failure to systematically characterize system specific goals and requirements and determine a set of standards by which the performance of the developed systems may be judged relative to those goals and requirements. Instead, we have pursued a largely uncoordinated set of quick-fixes to address very specific issues, without adequately considering a strategy to integrate preparedness and response capabilities across all public safety disciplines and without a set of standards and metrics to allow an assessment of performance. This project will produce a set of metrics – a framework of related, capability-based measures based on preparedness goals and requirements – that will allow a rigorous assessment of progress. It will help answer, “How prepared are we?” and “Are we prepared enough?” It will provide a basis for decision accountability using a sound assessment process.