C4I Center



   C4I Home

   Center Overview
   C4I Brief
   C4I People

   Objectives
   Programs
   Funding & Support
   Industry Partners

   Publications
   Recordings
   Open Source Software

   C4I Events
   News

   Internet Conference


GMU C4I Center Seminar




Citizens Emergency Response Portal
System Simulation Experiment:
After-Action Review

Jim Dear
MITRE Corporation

Friday, March 8, 2013 at 1:30 PM

Nguyen Engineering building, Room 4705

ABSTRACT

Real-time citizen interaction has the potential to transform society's response to crisis situations. New systems and processes must be developed to support citizen involvement and first responders must be trained in their use. The Citizens' Emergency Response Portal System (CERPS) Simulation Experiment (CERPS SIMEX) examined the role of public interaction through social media during emergency situations. The SIMEX was conducted over five days in October 2012 at the Net-Centric C4ISR Experimentation Lab (NCEL) housed at The MITRE Corporation's McLean, Va., headquarters and on the George Mason University (GMU) campus in Fairfax, Va. No actual emergency activities occurred on the campus; the SIMEX was conducted behind a firewall to avoid unintentional public panic. The SIMEX brought together emergency response personnel from federal, state, county and city jurisdictions in the National Capital Region of Washington, D.C. Emergency operators used real command and control systems with simulated reporting and sensor systems. Citizen participants were volunteers recruited from the GMU student body. The primary purpose of the SIMEX was to examine the hypothesis that citizen participation via social media in crisis response decision-making can improve the outcome of a crisis. This SIMEX was intended to establish a baseline for future research on crisis response decision support employing citizen participation.

BIO

Jim Dear is Senior Principal Staff at the MITRE Corporation and the Project Leader for the Net-Centric C4ISR Experimentation Lab (NCEL). The technologies and concepts behind the CERPS SIMEX were developed and integrated in the NCEL. The government uses NCEL to conduct simulation experiments (SIMEXs) that place actual military and civilian operators in various crisis-based scenarios. During the SIMEXs, operators use real command and control systems linked to simulated reporting and sensor systems. In the last 10 years, sponsors and customers from the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have used these SIMEXs to develop concepts of operations (CONOPS) and tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) around the use of emerging technologies. Since 2002, NCEL has conducted 43 SIMEXs.





Last updated: 06/09/2014