Modeling Center Helps Planners Avoid Disaster

Signal, Feb 2008 by Kenyon, Henry S

Snyder shares that one of NISAC's core resources is its staff. The personnel at Sandia and Los Alamos can gather huge amounts of data about ongoing events and, within a short time, determine impacts to affected infrastructures and their cascading events. At first, customers asked for tools and models, but she admits that what they really wanted were answers. NISAC personnel realized they had to develop an assortment of tools such as FAIT to permit the staff to answer questions quickly. The center's analysts are a team of multidisciplinary experts with specialized Ph.D.s and master's degrees in aspects of every infrastructure, she says.

The DHS is responsible for protecting 17 critical infrastructures in two tiers. Tier 1 assets are key facilities, systems and structures warranting significant additional infrastructure investment and defense. The loss or disruption of these assets could cripple the nation. The loss of Tier 2 assets, while not as debilitating, would still have major consequences. Snyder explains that this presents analysts with a 17-dimensional problem including challenges such as collecting and conveying information to the right personnel at the right time. The FAIT tool is a core asset for this work, she says.

Besides FAIT, the center has developed several industryspecific tools to accelerate incident analysis. These applications include the Railroad Network Analysis System and the Air Transport Optimization Model designed to study and understand the flow of commodities through the nation's rail and air networks.

Another key tool is the MSAC Agent-Based Laboratory for Economics (N-ABLE). It is a large-scale macroeconomic simulation that models the complex internal supply chain and market dynamics of businesses in the U.S. economy. N-ABLE models the economy down to the individual firm. These virtual firms have individual buyers, supervisors, sellers and strategic planners who collectively move their companies through economic disruption and recovery.

NISAC also has capabilities in geospatial information systems, database and knowledge management. Snyder explains that this knowledge management ability is unique to Sandia. "We took all of the ability that we'd been working on over many years for the nuclear weapons complex and leveraged that into our critical infrastructure protection area, where we can gather huge amounts of information and make it usable to our analysts," she says.

The center's analysts work in a variety of teams such as the Computational Economics Group, which examines the complex economic issues underlying infrastructure interaction. For example, because the majority of U.S. businesses are small, it became necessary for NISAC to understand how the removal of small parts of the supply chain can have an impact on how the business infrastructure rearranges itself.

Both Sandia and Los Alamos acquire data from a range of commercial and government sources for use in NISAC reports and studies. Snyder notes that customers often demand immediate answers to questions. "As a national lab, you want to give the 100-percent correct answer. But sometimes the best answer you can give is better than no answer at all in the time frame it's needed," she says. The center also produces short-analysis white papers and longer, in-depth analysis papers.