Research
ARMS is an Automated Resource Management System for equipment deployment route finding. ARMS is written in C#, the ESRI ArcGIS Engine, a MySQL database, and TCP/IP networking sockets for connection with client devices with a Windows Mobile application installed. An object oriented five-tiered architecture is used with design patterns to enable flexible extensions and clarity in responsibilities among objects and automated grouping and correlation in creation and behaving of objects. Analytical results are published on the Internet Information Services (IIS) web server with ESRI’s ArcGIS Server Enterprise installed.
ED2H is a simulation model that captures the characteristics of a distributed decision making process, for resource and equipment distribution, inspired by Honeybees’ foraging behavior. The simulation model is implemented in Matlab for its simple array management and figure drawing functionalities without using any existing toolboxes.
The model is inspired by Biesmeijer and Seeley’s research on Honeybees’ Behavior.
SUPER-MAN is an application Supporting Urban Preparedness and Emergency Response using Mobile Ad-hoc Networks written in C#.The application utilizes RFID reader and tags to store critical information of buildings in disaster response and recovery operations.
The SUPER-MAN application is to address challenges encountered in the current practice for structural engineers and first responders to inspect and disseminate building damage assessments more efficiently to support Urban Search & Rescue.
The following are students who worked on the SUPER-MAN project: Albert Y. Chen, Albert P. Plans, Timothy Lantz, Navodit Kaushik, Sanyogita Lakhera, Ming-Hsuan Tsai, Shobhit Mathur, Lalit Bhakal, Shrinivas Viswanath, Dominik Grusemann, Matthew Klupchak, Michael Davidson and Saumil Mehta. The SUPER-MAN project received the Michael S. Hughes Award in Software Engineering which is established to encourage and reward achievement in software engineering. The award is given to members of the best project completed in the software engineering course, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign.
E2RP, the Emergency Response Repository Portal is a geodatabase that stores critical assets of the local emergency management agency. Resource information is geocoded into the PostgreSQL database with the spatial extension PostGIS enabled. Result of spatial query to the geodatabase is shown on an Apache web server with Map Server installed. It enables first responders and decision makers to perform spatial queries of available resources to support the logistic response to disasters.
The CP2R Project
I have been working on the CP2R Project (Collaboration framework to Prepare against, Respond to and Recover from disasters.) at Illinois since Fall 2006. This research aims at providing a robust and reliable IT-supported collaboration framework that will greatly enhance relief efforts during disasters involving critical physical infrastructures (CPIs) through a combination of a set of collaboration patterns. To achieve this goal, the collective and collaborative behavior of insect societies as well as the fast propagation of some diseases will be explored and applied, along with existing epidemic-based communication algorithms. The CP2R project is a multidisciplinary project that integrates the academic areas of civil engineering, architecture, computer science, psychology, epidemiology, entomology as well as practical firefighting training. The following are selected sub-projects of the CP2R I have initiated or participated:
