Validation and Evaluation of Emergency Response Plans through Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation

Biological emergency response planning plays a critical role in protecting the public from possible devastating results of sudden disease outbreaks. These plans describe the distribution of medical countermeasures across the affected region using limited resources and within a restricted time window. The ability to determine that such plans will be feasible, in terms of successfully providing service to affected populations within the time limit, is crucial. Current efforts, such as live drills and training, to validate plans may not test plan activation at the appropriate scale or account for dynamic real-time events. This paper presents Validating Emergency Response Plan Execution Through Simulation (VERPETS), a novel computational system for the agent-based simulation of biological emergency response plan activation. This system integrates raw road network, population distribution, and emergency response plan data, and simulates traffic in the affected region using SUMO, or Simulations of Urban Mobility.