Beyond the Nuclear Blast: Data-Driven Multiscale Disruption Modeling with EffectCube
Abstract
Complementing the diversity of efforts focused on understanding direct physical effects of nuclear weapons in the vicinity of ground zero, this project focuses on exploration of secondary effects at a regional and national level, caused by the ensuing societal and economic disruptions that propagate through complex infrastructures and dependency chains. Examples include disruptions to food production, water supply, connectivity, road networks, and fuel, as well as resulting subsequent effects on service delivery, supply availability, medical services, and human mobility. At present, no comprehensive models exist that allow accurate analysis and prediction of physical, economic, and societal damage due to such secondary effects at multiple temporal and spatial scales. Towards that end, we offer four contributions. We propose to develop a data-driven multiscale disruption modeling approach with EffectCube as follows: (i) collect and store a comprehensive repository of large-scale disasters (natural and man-made) and their secondary effects, by automated analysis of world text, (ii) extract semantics-rich entities, attributes and relationships and construct a multi-dimensional TextCube with appropriate dimensions along which these data can be classified, (iii) build models to extrapolate missing pieces in the resulting sparse high-dimensional space to turn TextCube into a model-based EffectCube, and (iv) offer a query interface that enables both diagnostic analysis (e.g., statistics over existing data) as well as predictive “what-if” analysis of secondary effects. The work complements analytical results in the area of analysis of damage cascades in large graphs by considering empirically-derived spatiotemporal models, influence factors, and parameters, learned from comprehensive analysis of world data.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jul 16, 2019
- Source ID
- HDTRA11810026
Entities
People
- Tarek Abdelzaher
Organizations
- Defense Threat Reduction Agency
- University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign