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March 2004
U researcher involved in congressional discussion of homeland security
Shashi Shekhar
Professor Shashi Shekhar of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering was invited to present his recent work on evacuation planning at a Congressional breakfast on homeland security February 5 in Washington, D.C. Shekhar's work was selected in a nationwide competition organized by the University Consortium on Geographic Information Systems (UCGIS).
The congressional breakfast was sponsored by Senator Charles Schumer and Rep. Christopher Shays and was attended by a number of congresspersons and their staff. Six Minnesota legislators were represented: Senator Mark Dayton, Rep. Martin Olav Sabo, Rep. James L. Oberstar, Rep. Gil Gutknecht, Rep. John Kline, and Rep. Collin C. Peterson.
The audience also included representation from a number of federal agencies, including the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Science Foundation, and the USDOT.
participants were briefed on the geographic dimension of terrorism and provided a report from a recent workshop sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. Half a dozen researchers including Shekhar presented their work in developing new GIS technologies to address specific homeland security issues related to evacuation planning, border security, protecting critical infrastructure, controlling epidemics, etc.
Shekhar provided an overview of evacuation planning, which identifies paths and schedules to move at-risk population out of the city to safe areas in the event of terrorist attacks, catastrophes, or natural disasters. Its goal is to identify near-optimal evacuation routes and schedules to minimize evacuation time despite limited transportation network capacity and the possibly large at-risk population.
Finding the optimal solution is computationally exorbitant due to the extremely large size of the transportation networks and the limited capacities, Shekhar says. His research proposes novel geospatial algorithms to determine competent evacuation plans. Evaluation of his team’s methods for evacuation planning for a disaster at the Monticello nuclear power plant near Minneapolis/St. Paul Twin Cities metropolitan area shows that the new methods lowered evacuation time relative to existing plans by providing higher capacities near the destination and by choosing shorter routes.
CTS, Mn/DOT, and the Federal Highway Administration are also sponsoring a part of this project to determine contra-flow configurations of the transportation networks to increase outbound capacities and reduce total evacuation time. The National Science Foundation sponsored earlier foundational work on efficient storage and management of transportation network map databases. Collaborators include QingSong Lu, Sangho Kim, Professor Eil Kwon (Minnesota State University), and Mike Sobolewsky (Mn/DOT).
Shekhar, a CTS Faculty Scholar, has worked with CTS and the ITS Institute for many years, and his previous work has well positioned the University to address security concerns.
Further details on the congressional breakfast are available from http://www.ucgis.org/winter2004/program.htm.