Sandia computer scientist Donna Djordjevich demonstrates the Borders High Level model to visitors. Credit: Dino Vournas |
With funding from the
Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP), researchers
at Sandia National Laboratories have developed a high-fidelity simulation and
analysis program that aids policy and decision-makers tasked with making key
procurements and funding choices.
The Borders High
Level Model (HLM) uses a serious gaming platform known as Ground Truth, a force-on-force
battle simulation tool called Dante, and the work of several collaborating
organizations.
“There’s a lot of
debate going on in the government concerning the technology and infrastructure
investments that need to be made along the border,” explained Jason Reinhardt,
who serves as the Borders HLM project manager at Sandia. “How much fence do we
need? What kind of fence? What is the right mix of border personnel and
technology? How can sensors, vehicles and other technical equipment most
effectively be used? With Borders HLM, CBP officials can simulate their
defensive architectures, accurately measure their performance and start to
answer these difficult questions.”
Ground Truth,
initially funded through internal Sandia investments in 2007, is a gaming
platform originally designed to prepare decision-makers and first responders
for weapons of mass destruction/weapons of mass effect (WMD/WME) attacks in
metropolitan areas. Developed by Sandia computer scientist and Borders HLM
principal investigator Donna Djordjevich, the software provides a virtual
environment where users can play through various scenarios to see the effects
of their decisions under the constraints of time and resources.
For the Borders HLM
project, the Ground Truth software has been integrated into a bottom-projected
touch surface table. On this game surface, users can see “people” moving across
the border terrain, observe CBP “personnel” responding to incidents and
essentially control those movements and “apprehend” suspects. Users can also
view a leader board of sorts that shows how many suspects have been
apprehended, the dollar amount spent implementing the chosen architecture and
other metrics that matter to CBP decision-makers.
Dante, also part of
the Borders HLM platform, is a force-on-force battle simulation tool built on
the well-known Umbra simulation framework developed and introduced in 2001 by Sandia
researchers.
The work also builds
from another Sandia borders project from the mid-2000s
(focused on the impact of new detection technology at ports of entry) and
capitalizes on a range of existing Sandia capabilities, including the Weapons
of Mass Destruction Decision Analysis Center (WMD-DAC), the National Infrastructure
Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC, a joint Sandia and Los Alamos National
Laboratory program) and even the lab’s expertise in robotics.
According to
Reinhardt and Djordjevich, there were a number of technical challenges in
integrating a mature modeling technology like Dante with a newer gaming
technology like Ground Truth.
“We needed to create
real-time control for the user, and our current capabilities weren’t built to
do that,” Reinhardt said.
“There’s also the fact
that we’re modeling 64 square miles of border, and we need to do so at a pretty
high fidelity,” added Djordjevich, who pointed out that Ground Truth’s terrain
was originally developed at a fixed, small scale.
To help overcome some
of the barriers, Sandia has looked to some important collaborators. The
Univ. of Utah provided a technology, Visualization Streams for
Ultimate Scalability (ViSUS), which allows researchers to progressively stream in
terrain and imagery data and minimize data processing requirements, an
important consideration given that HLM requires many gigabytes of data. For its
part, Happynin Games, an iPhone/mobile game development company, developed the 3D
artwork and the characters found in the simulations. Sandia, acting as the
systems integrator, then put all the pieces together, presented the Borders HLM
product to CBP and demonstrated how it would allow them to go through all the
steps of the “engagement analysis cycle.”
“We learned that the
border patrol agents and CBP decision-makers need a tool that offers a common
view of the problems they face,” Reinhardt said. “With our high level model,
they can play through various scenarios and see how people, technology and
other elements all interact. Then, later, they can go back and do a baseline
analysis and dig into the details of why certain architectures and solutions
aren’t working as well as they should.” CBP personnel can then play the game
again with a recommended solution, and the end users can critique and tweak it
to their liking.
With additional
funding and the right kind of collaborations, Djordjevich said, more robust
features could be added to make Borders HLM even more valuable to CBP and other
potential customers. The current version, for instance, only deals with
individual border crossers, so it doesn’t capture crowd behaviors. Other sensor
types, such as radiation detectors or even airborne equipment, could also be
added.
Reinhardt says the
future of the Borders HLM tool will likely depend on the direction in which CPB
chooses to go with its border operations. “Our high-level models tool will
likely change the way CBP conducts its business, and it will probably have a
real long-term impact on how large expenditures are justified or reputed on and
around the nation’s borders.”