Smallpox over San Diego: Joint Real-Time Federations of Distributed Simulations and Simulation Users under a Common Scenario

A joint project between the California and New Mexico branches of Sandia National Laboratories has demonstrated the formation of joint real-time federations of both distributed simulations and distributed simulation users under a common scenario. Two software integration frameworks were used to achieve the real-time federations. The IDSim framework, developed by Georgia Tech University and Sandia National Laboratories, was used to create the real-time federation of distributed simulations, in this case the BioDAC WMD simulation and the N-ABLEtrade agent-based microeconomic simulation (more properly, because of the impact of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, an N-ABLEtrade emulator). The GroupMeldtrade multimedia synchronous collaboration framework, developed by Sandia, was used to create the real-time federation of simulation users and simulation analysis communities. The common scenario was the release of smallpox over San Diego, California, and the operating hypothesis was that the economy itself dampens the spread of a pathogen. In addition, a small pilot experiment using the joint federations allowed a greater range of crisis management options to be performed and evaluated than would have been possible without the use of the integration frameworks.