SBIR-STTR Award

Critical infrastructure is the backbone on which this country's success and prosperity are built. As a highly technically advanced nation, we rely heavily on our infrastructure to support all of the challenges of everyday life from providing power, heat, and water to communications, financial transactions, emergency services, and countless other functions without which this country would cease to operate. This foundation, however, is vulnerable. While a considerable number of tools exist to aid decision makers in examining the impact of well defined disaster events, little research has been done to provide real-time analysis and decision support for emerging, dynamic threats. Under this SBIR, High Performance Technologies Inc. proposes the creation of the Current Event - Future Outcome (CEFO) Predictive Framework, which will leverage modern advances in predictive capability with mathematical sensitivity and factor analysis to provide enhanced support for analysts and policy makers as events are occurring. Through the use of a three-layered architecture, CEFO will allow users to identify and prioritize key, event specific factors throughout all stages of the event chain and provide predictive insight into the potential impact and associated risks of emerging threats

Many government agencies share the need to determine the best courses of action that diminish the long range threat, vulnerability or impact from a potential event that affects our domestic population or infrastructure. We propose to develop a functional prototype of the Current Event - Future Outcome (CEFO) software we described in Phase I, which will leverage the existing wealth of domain-specific and integrated models from many sources, along with innovative techniques drawn from probabilistic risk assessment, decision theory, and statistical analysis. We will reuse and customize software from other sources to create a workflow platform that can accommodate various existing infrastructure models. We will develop user-friendly interfaces in creating this prototype. We will collaborate with another government agency to demonstrate the effectiveness of the prototype by modeling a regional infrastructure scenario of interest. This will demonstrate that CEFO can provide useful understanding of the complex interrelationships between actions and effects in an interconnected domestic infrastructure. The demonstration will show how the software enables government planners to easily apply systems dynamics methodologies to analyze the impact of events, and potential responsive actions as they relate to the physical, economic, or social infrastructure.