Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani

Escaping Death – Geometrical Recommendations for High Value Targets

Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) and Suicide Bombing have become the headline news for every other day. It is a growing global phenomenon that is happening from Iraq to Afghanistan, Syria to United Kingdom and Spain to Pakistan. An average US soldier in Iraq receives 6 to 23 blast wave shocks over his/her tenure in Iraq. Pakistan has witnessed 120 suicide bombing attacks in last six years. While various attempts have been made to assess the impact of blast overpressure on buildings and animals, little has been done on crowd formation, crowd density and underlying geometry to mitigate the effects. This paper is set to make geometrical recommendations to reduce the casualties in case of such an incident for high value targets, like mosques and army facilities in the frontline countries fighting the global war on terrorism. A virtual simulation tool has been developed which is capable of assessing the impact of crowd formation patterns and their densities on the magnitude of injury and number of casualties during a suicide bombing attack. Results indicated that the worst crowd formation is street (Zig-Zag) where 30% crowd can be dead and 45% can be injured, given typical explosive carrying capacity of a single suicide bomber. Row wise crowd formations was found to be the best for reducing the effectiveness of an attack with 18% crowd in lethal zone and 38% in injury zones. For a typical suicide bombing attack, we can reduce the number of fatalities by 12%, and the number of injuries by 7%. Simulation results were compared and validated by the real-life incidents and found to be in good agreement. Line-of-sight with the attacker, rushing towards the exit, and stampede were found to be the most lethal choices both during and after the attack. These findings, although preliminary, may have implications for emergency response and counter terrorism.

Intelligent Agents in Extreme Conditions – Modeling and Simulation of Suicide Bombing for Risk Assessment

Intelligent agents in extreme conditions is an attempt to use agent based simulation to save lives, predict the outcome of catastrophic events like suicide bombing, and model the behavior of crowd in emergency situations. This work is set to implement, test, analyze and measure intelligent agents’ behavior and its consequences under extreme conditions like suicide bombing through multi-agent simulation. Suicide bombing has become one of the most lethal and favorite modus operandi of terrorist organizations around the world. It claims 48% of the casualties, while only 3% of all terrorist attacks can be classified as suicide bombing attacks. On average, there is a suicide bombing attack somewhere in the world on every 6th day that claims 13.4 lives (on average) per attack (Usmani a, 2009). While various attempts have been made to assess the impact of explosions on structures, little has been done on modeling the impact of a blast wave for an individual or a crowd. There is no tool exist to determine the impact of explosion as a function of crowd dynamics, and explosive characteristics. And there is not a single method available to map the blast overpressure to human injuries that is calibrated against the real-life victims’ data. All of the existing estimates and pressure-lethality curves are based on experiments on pigs, sheep, and data collected from stationary sensors without any consideration of blockage and 3D environment. Explosion modeling is a complicated task that requires the knowledge of physical properties of explosions, projectiles and debris, chemical properties of explosive materials and their reactions, complex details of simulating gaseous and combustion flows with boundary conditions, complex coding for blast waves and fragmentation models, know-how of computational fluid dynamics, and the overall impact of explosions on humans and structures supported by experimental and theoretical studies. This work explains the physics, explosive models, mathematics and the assumptions we need to create such a simulation. The work also describes human shields available in the crowd with partial and full blockage in both two dimensional and three dimensional environments. A virtual simulation tool (BlastSim) has been developed which is capable of assessing the impact of crowd formation patterns and their densities on the magnitude of injury and 23

3D Simulation of Suicide Bombing – Using Computers to Save Lives

This paper asks a new question: how, as computer scientists, we can save the lives of the people living in the troubled areas of the world where suicide bombing and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) explosions become routine incidents in daily lives. How we can utilize the power of modeling and simulation and the advantages of agents based simulation to create a virtual environment to run and test the suicide bombing incidents. And to gain valuable insights on geometrical arrangements, and crowd formations and densities to find out the optimum and safest crowd formations. Which when followed will minimize the number of deaths and injuries during a suicide bombing attack. This paper presents the science of suicide bombing under the framework of agent based simulation. It also explains the physics, explosive models, mathematics and the assumptions we need to create such a simulation. The work also describes human shields available in the crowd with partial and full coverage in both 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional environments. A virtual simulation tool has been developed which is capable of assessing the impact of crowd formation patterns and their densities on the magnitude of injury and number of casualties during a suicide bombing attack. Results indicated that the worst crowd formation is street (Zig-Zag) where 30% crowd can be dead and 45% can be injured, given typical explosive carrying capacity of a single suicide bomber. Row wise crowd formations was found to be the best for reducing the effectiveness of an attack with 18% crowd in lethal zone and 38% in injury zones. For a typical suicide bombing attack, we can reduce the number of fatalities by 12%, and the number of injuries by 7% by simply following the recommendations in this paper. Simulation results were compared and validated by the real-life incidents and found to be in good agreement. Line-of-sight with the attacker, rushing towards the exit, and stampede were found to be the most lethal choices both during and after the attack. These findings, although preliminary, may have implications for emergency response and counter terrorism.

Random walk in extreme conditions - an agent based simulation of suicide bombing

This paper presents a Monte-Carlo simulation tool based on stationary multi-agent system. The agents are constrained by physical characteristics and mechanics of blast waves. The proposed tool examines the impact of blast waves in an event of suicide bombing on human body. The tool is capable of assessing the impact of crowd formation patterns and their densities on the magnitude of injury and number of casualties during a suicide bombing attack. While various attempts have been made to assess the impact of blast waves and its overpressure on buildings and animals, little has been done on crowd formation, crowd density and underlying geometry to mitigate the effects. Results indicated that the worst crowd formation is street (Zig-Zag) where 30% crowd can be dead and 45% can be injured, given typical explosive carrying capacity of a single suicide bomber. Row wise crowd formations was found to be the best for reducing the effectiveness of an attack with 18% crowd in lethal zone and 38% in injury zones. For a typical suicide bombing attack, we can reduce the number of fatalities by 12%, and the number of injuries by 7%. The simulation results were compared and validated by the real-life incidents and found to be in good agreement. Line-of-sight with the attacker, rushing towards the exit, and stampede were found to be the most lethal choices both during and after the attack. These findings, although preliminary, may have implications for emergency response and counter terrorism.

Modeling and simulation of explosion effectiveness as a function of blast and crowd characteristics

Explosions in civil settings are becoming the daily news. While various explosive simulations and models have been developed for battlefield and industrial settings, much less has been done for civil settings and urban terrains.This paper presents the science of suicide bombing and explains the physics, explosive models, mathematics, and the assumptions we need to create such a simulation.The proposed simulation tool is capable of assessing the impact of crowd formation patterns and their densities on the magnitude of injury and number of casualties during a suicide bombing attack. Results indicate that the worst crowd formation is a street (zigzag) where 30% of the crowd can be dead and 45% can be injured, given the typical explosive carrying capacity of a single suicide bomber. Row-wise crowd formation was found to be the best for reducing the effectiveness of an attack with 18% of the crowd in the lethal zone and 38% in the injury zone. Crowd blockage and densities can reduce the fatalities by 12% and injuries by 7%. Simulation results were compared and validated by real-life incidents and found to be in good agreement. These findings, although preliminary, may have implications for emergency response and counter terrorism.

Emergency 101 - suicide bombers, crowd formations and blast waves

Suicide bombing has become one of the most lethal and favorite modus-operandi of terrorist organizations around the world. While various attempts have been made to assess the impact of crowd density on suicide bomber effectiveness, the specifics of the actual crowd formation and orientation of the bomber with respect to the crowd has not been examined. A virtual simulation tool has been developed which is capable of assessing the impact of crowd formation patterns on the magnitude of injury and number of casualties during a suicide bombing attack. The tool examines variables such as the number and arrangement of people within a crowd for typical layouts, the number of suicide bombers, and the nature of the explosion including equivalent weight of TNT and the duration of the resulting blast wave pulse. The goals of the analysis are to determine optimal crowd formations to reduce the deaths and/or injuries of individuals in the crowd, to determine what architectural and geometric changes can reduce the number of casualties and injuries, and what is the correlation between variant crowd densities and formations with the weight and pulse duration of the explosives? Results indicated that the worst crowd formation is street (e.g. Zig-Zag) where 44% crowd can be dead and 71% can be injured (there is an overlap of injury and lethality), given typical explosive carrying capacity of a single suicide bomber. Bus and market crowd formations were found to be the best for reducing the effectiveness of an attack, with 24% and 26% crowd in lethal zone respectively and 58% and 54% in injury zones. Simulation results were compared and validated by the real-life incidents and found to be in good agreement. Line-of-sight with the attacker, rushing towards the exit, and stampede were found to be the most lethal choices both during the attack and post-explosion. These findings, although preliminary, may have implications for emergency response and counter terrorism. The paper also discusses additional capabilities that are being developed for the model.

Besides Tracking – Simulation of RFID Marketing and Beyond

This paper asks a new question: how we can use RFID technology in marketing products in supermarkets and how we can measure its performance or ROI (Return-on-Investment). We try to answer the question by proposing a simulation model whereby customers become aware of other customers’ real-time shopping behavior and may hence be influenced by their purchases and the levels of purchases. The proposed model is orthogonal to sales model and can have the similar effects: increase in the overall shopping volume. Managers often struggle with the prediction of ROI on purchasing such a technology, this simulation sets to provide them the answers of questions like the percentage of increase in sales given real-time purchase information to other customers. The simulation is also flexible to incorporate any given model of customers’ behavior tailored to particular supermarket, settings, events or promotions. The results, although preliminary, are promising to use RFID technology for marketing products in supermarkets and provide several dimensions to look for influencing customers via feedback, real-time marketing, target advertisement and on-demand promotions. Several other parameters have been discussed including the herd behavior, fake customers, privacy, and optimality of sales-price margin and the ROI of investing in RFID technology for marketing purposes.

I Know What You Did This Summer - Users´ Behavior on Internet

Human age is surrounded by assumed set of rules and behaviors imposed by local culture and the society they live in. This paper introduces software that counts the presence of a person on the Internet and examines the activities he/she conducts online. The paper answers questions such as how “old” are you on the Internet? How soon will a newbie be exposed to adult websites? How long will it take for a new Internet user to know about social networking sites? And how many years a user has to surf online to celebrate his/her first “birthday” of Internet presence? Paper findings from a database of 105 school and university students containing their every click of first 24 hours of Internet usage are presented. The findings provide valuable insights for Internet Marketing, ethics, Internet business and the mapping of Internet life with real life. Privacy and ethical issues related to the study have been discussed at the end.

BlastSim — Multi agent simulation of suicide bombing

This paper introduces BlastSim — physics based stationary multi-agent simulation of blast waves and its impact on human body. The agents are constrained by physical characteristics and mechanics of blast wave. The simulation is capable of assessing the impact of crowd formation patterns on the magnitude of injury and number of casualties during a suicide bombing attack. It also examines variables such as the number and arrangement of people within a crowd for typical layouts, the number of suicide bombers, and the nature of the explosion including equivalent weight of TNT, and the duration of the resulting blast wave pulse. The paper also explains the physics, explosive models, mathematics and the assumptions we need to create such a simulation. Furthermore, it also describes human shields available in the crowd with partial and full coverage in both two dimensional and three dimensional environments. The goals of this paper are to determine optimal crowd formations to reduce the deaths and/or injuries of individuals in the crowd. The findings, although preliminary, may have implications for forensics investigations, emergency response and counterterrorism.

Virtual Iraq - Simulation of insurgent attacks

This paper presents the science of suicide bombing under the framework of agent based simulation. It also explains the physics, explosive models, mathematics and the assumptions we need to create such a simulation. The work also describes human shields available in the crowd with partial and full coverage in both two dimensional and three dimensional environments. A virtual simulation tool has been developed which is capable of assessing the impact of crowd formation patterns and their densities on the magnitude of injury and number of casualties during a suicide bombing attack. Results indicated that the worst crowd formation is street (Zig-Zag) where 30% crowd can be dead and 45% can be injured, given typical explosive carrying capacity of a single suicide bomber. Row wise crowd formations was found to be the best for reducing the effectiveness of an attack with 18% crowd in lethal zone and 38% in injury zones. For a typical suicide bombing attack, we can reduce the number of fatalities by 12%, and the number of injuries by 7% by simply following the recommendations in this paper. Simulation results were compared and validated by the real-life incidents in Iraq and found to be in good agreement. Line-of-sight with the attacker, rushing towards the exit, and stampede were found to be the most lethal choices both during and after the attack. These findings, although preliminary, may have implications for emergency response and counter terrorism.