Gerard P. Learmonth

Modeling the Complexities of Water, Hygiene, and Health in Limpopo Province, South Africa

Researchers have long studied the causes and prevention strategies of poor household water quality and early childhood diarrhea using intervention-control trials. Although the results of such trails can lead to useful information, they do not capture the complexity of this natural/engineered/social system. We report on the development of an agent-based model (ABM) to study such a system in Limpopo, South Africa. The study is based on four years of field data collection to accurately capture essential elements of the communities and their water contamination chain. An extensive analysis of those elements explored behaviors including water collection and treatment frequency as well as biofilm buildup in water storage containers, source water quality, and water container types. Results indicate that interventions must be optimally implemented in order to see significant reductions in early childhood diarrhea (ECD). Household boiling frequency, source water quality, water container type, and the biofilm layer contribution were deemed to have significant impacts on ECD. Furthermore, concurrently implemented highly effective interventions were shown to reduce diarrhea rates to very low levels even when other, less important practices were suboptimal. This technique can be used by a variety of stakeholders when designing interventions to reduce ECD incidences in similar settings.

A comparison of evaluation methods for police patrol district designs

Police patrol district design presents a multi-objective optimization problem with two goals: minimizing workload variation between patrol districts and minimizing the response time for officers responding to calls for service. We evaluate three different methods for scoring district designs: a closed form probability based approach, a discrete-event simulation based on hypercube models for spatial queuing systems, and an agent-based simulation model. We find that all methods provide similar evaluations when service demand is low enough that cross-boundary support is infrequent. However, when the demand for service routinely exceeds the supply available within districts, only the agent-based simulation model accurately represents the resulting complexities and significantly changes the evaluation scores to reflect the behavior of the system.

Changing knives into spoons

Politicians and the media paint contrasting pictures of the situation in Iraq from a growing insurgency and pending civil war to a blooming democracy in the Middle East. However, in all of the discussions, the question of how to employ forces to fight the insurgency is often avoided and rarely answered. This project will attempt to develop a hybrid agent-based simulation to examine resource allocation strategies. The study will examine insurgent behavior and responses to distance based outpost manning and a more incident driven strategy. Initial results show that a tradeoff between the strategies offers the best benefits in both the short and long term for a collection of counter-insurgency metrics.

Design of a simulation environment for space-based information management and distribution

Many studies have previously been conducted on the subject of service oriented architectures in traditional terrestrial networks. Researchers have only recently begun to apply these studies to space-based networks. This project focuses on the design of a simulation environment for running distributed software services in a space-based network. Specifically, a constellation of linked satellites in a LEO (low earth orbit) configuration is used as the space-based architecture to model. The environment was created by integrating a combination of commercial, open source, and custom written software. The major components of the environment include an orbital propagation and simulation tool, graphical user interfaces for service request initiation and results, a network emulator, a routing module, and service oriented architecture based processing applications. Validation using a simple test scenario showed that the final design of the environment functions in an accurate manner.

Agent-based simulation model for predicting adoption rates of Electronic Medical Records

There is an emerging trend among healthcare providers towards the replacement of paper-based health records with Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) in order to increase the quality of healthcare [1]–[4]. President Barack Obamas proposed health care plan encourages the adoption of state-of-the-art health information technology systems [5]. Interoperability is a critical issue in EMR systems, and uncertainty about which systems will become prevalent within the industry represents a barrier to adoption. This paper presents an agent-based model for characterizing the rate of adoption of EMRs based on the weighted importance of vendor functionality to institutional needs. Seeking to develop a decision-making tool within this arena, we have implemented an agent-based simulation that reveals the impact of various features on overall adoption rates. This paper discusses our model; the justification of its parameters; the uses among several social groups; and the interpretation of our findings.

Designing user experiences for policymakers in serious games in the domain of global food security

Policymakers face complex tradeoffs in their efforts to achieve global food security. One way to better understand tradeoffs of alternative interventions may come from practicing in simulated environments in a participatory fashion. Serious games employing agent-based simulation have been designed to practice individual and group decision-making in complex domains such as healthcare and sustainability, but often lack clear representation of data and workflow to users. The work herein describes the design of the user experience (UX) and a series of user interfaces (UI) for a serious game to address issues surrounding global food security. Per the design of the user experience, participants work together to invest in a series of projects over the course of four rounds to improve the capacity for food and nutrition in their continental region. Distinct UIs were designed for program officers (environment, agriculture, and health) as well as regional directors. The design focused upon four specific considerations: indicators to tie individual projects to pertinent data, hierarchical and multi-level representation of data, adaptable means of communication for the different player roles, and appropriately detailed feedback. The design was preliminarily tested with heuristics experts and a cohort of students before the game was officially played in the field at eight global sites as the 2017 NASPAA-Batten Student Simulation Competition.

Application of Service Oriented Architecture to emulation of onboard processing satellite systems

With increased service demands on remote sensing and communication satellites researchers are considering equipping the next generation of satellite constellations with onboard computer systems capable of general purpose computing in space. This project focuses on the design of an emulator capable of using a local area network to emulate both the passing of data between satellites and to ground-based users and the execution of data processing applications. Because satellite constellations perform a wide variety of services, the emulator design incorporates Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to allow the flexibility of running a variety of different software applications and to easily support new, as-yet designed applications. This emulator uses the Hypercast package of Java network interfaces and a modular programming structure for passing information and files between simulated satellite and user objects. The data routing is controlled through the use of the commercial software Satellite Toolkit (STK), which calculates all communication capability and quality information for any satellite constellation. The system is capable of passing any necessary data allowing for the design of a universal interface for how applications receive information and return results. Currently, this capability is tested using image capture/passing and image classification software both of which have proved successful applications on a Service Oriented Architecture system.