Homeland Security Modeling and Simulation Workshop

This workshop is a joint effort of U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The workshop welcomes all stakeholders who want to advance M&S capabilities for homeland security and will promote dialogue and knowledge sharing among diverse communities to support critical areas for DHS and homeland security enterprise. The workshop will provide an opportunity to share information, promote cross-fertilization of ideas, identify community research and standards needs, review plans, and help to establish community consensus on a number of technical issues. Subject matter experts and other homeland security M&S stakeholders, both inside and outside the government that can serve as reliable information sources and sounding boards for various M&S related homeland security activities carried out within homeland security enterprise are encouraged to attend the workshop.
 
Many current homeland security M&S capabilities are concentrated in the following domains:

• Incident Management
• Critical Infrastructure Systems
• Hazardous Material Releases
• Healthcare Systems
  

Plenary and breakout sessions will provide opportunities to identify important technical issues and share information in each of the above domains. The proposed objectives of the workshop are listed below.

• Refinement and/or expansion of definition of the technical scope for each identified domain
• Specification/ratification of simulation user needs and modeling requirements
• Recommendation of appropriate modeling techniques
• Identification of:
• • relevant existing models and tools
  • data sources and reference data sets
  • guidelines, formats, and standards
  • best practices
• Recommendations for M&S evaluation approaches such as verification, validation, and accreditation
  

The workshop will be unclassified. Attendees to the workshop will receive materials that define the scope of each M&S domain and associated preliminary information that has been assembled including: needs analyses, requirements specifications, listing of M&S resources, research and standards issues, and references. Participants will review, update, and expand upon this preliminary information set during the workshop. Findings and recommendations from the workshop will be made available to stakeholders and the general public as technical reports for each domain.