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MODELING AND INFORMATICS
This research will contribute to the development and immediate application of the next generation of analytic capacity to address the DHS’ priority areas, thereby allowing more precise assessment of potential threats to U.S. animal agriculture. The Center’s core members are experienced in developing and applying models and related databases in the area of food and agriculture, including animal health and foreign animal disease.
Working cooperatively with National Laboratory and other Federal, state, and local partners, the Center will expand its already existing programs to acquire, develop, and organize the complex array of databases that are needed to comprehensively model foreign animal and zoonotic disease threats. Biological, epidemiological, economic, environmental, and production models will be developed. The models will be usable individually or in various combinations, depending on the task at hand. They will be scalable, ultimately extending from local to international levels. When linked and integrated, they will form a larger decision-support system (DSS) to allow comprehensive assessment of the range of options and consequences facing DHS’ decision-makers. Middleware will be developed to allow the multiple modeling systems to be related.
Geospatial and geostatistical analyses will be integral parts of the DSS, allowing the examination of the spatial characterization behavior of the foreign animal and zoonotic disease issues. Risk assessment and gaming simulations will be included that extend across all DHS priority areas as they relate to animal agricultural bioterrorism. Combining the DSS models with computerized gaming will allow realistic simulations for planning, training, and development of improved incident-management strategies.
Innovative strategies, such as estimation of livestock and wildlife densities from land use and land form and vegetation typing will provide an interim proxy for the expected animal identification system. Database acquisition and development will be critical to the use of the DSS. Efforts will focus on the quick and efficient assembly of static and relational databases. Distributed network data warehousing techniques will be used across the range of core institutions to jointly manage the assembly of the needed databases. The principle deliverables will include direct access to databases to serve the information needs of decision-makers, as well as data for input into the simulation models.
As databases increase in number, size, and complexity, increasing emphasis will be placed on use of modern informatics to integrate the database retrieval system with common user and application interfaces, thereby maximizing the utility of the databases in the investigators’ and Center’s applications. A grid-services approach to high-performance computing, which was developed by USC, will be used to allow hosting of applications across a distributed network of cooperating computing platforms.
USC will be the lead institution in delivery of secure-systems architectures that will meet the DHS’ needs. Ongoing collaboration and coordination with the ultimate government users of these products will be actively pursued.