Success Stories
COBRA Gold 08 - Infectious Disease SImulation and Planning
Context for Cobra Gold
From http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/cobra-gold.htm: “Cobra Gold is a regularly-scheduled joint/combined exercise and is the latest in the continuing series of U.S. – Thai military exercises designed to ensure regional peace and strengthen the ability of the Royal Thai Armed Forces to defend Thailand or respond to regional contingencies. Cobra Gold is one of several training exercises the US conducts with Thailand each year. The US funds Thai military and civilian professional development training under the international military education and training program (IMET). Thailand is a generous host to US Navy ships that make frequent port calls at Pattaya and Phuket. Cobra Gold is a six-week exercise during April and May, the hottest time of the year in Thailand where daytime temperatures linger between 103 and 107 degrees Fahrenheit.”
The theme for this years exercise is a civil war occurring in a fictional island Pacifica between several ethnic groups. Both UN and Coalition Task Forces (CTF) have been deployed in the island to maintain the peace. During the course of the exercise, there are reports of Avian Flu Outbreak in Northern Pacifica (modeled after the west coast of the US), leading to confirmation of one human death resulting from exposure to the H5N1 virus. The challenge for the QLI TOMM tool is to provide a prognostic course of action planning capability for the forces under the backdrop of a possible pandemic spread of influenza. The relevant parts of the more detailed script guiding the exercise were made available to the Quantum Leap development team. A secondary goal for the deliverable was to provide an integration capability with Alion’s existing TOMM (“Toolkit for Operational Medical Modeling”) system. Key attributes of Gryphon adapted specifically to the CG08 system are described below:
Cobra Gold Model - 08
The CobraGold08 model includes three population groups, all with different medical/disease characteristics, civilians, a multi-national military force, and several refugee camps. The model for the CobraGold08 deliverable is derived from the briefing documentation made available to the team with further information provided by PACOM through Alion.
Bird Fly-way Simulation
While not directly part of the Gryphon simulation, a simple simulation of birds following a pre-defined fly-way along the west side of Pacifica is integrated in the deliverable to assist the operator in determining the likelihood of a disease outbreak to be bird-flu related. This is part of the operator’s task during the CobraGold08 exercise per briefing.
Interventions
The only intervention required by the CobraGold08 exercise is Tamiflu as an anti-viral medicine. The model includes two Tamiflu stockpiles, both under control of the multi-national peace-keeping force. During the simulation, the operator can select a stockpile and a population group to whom the anti-viral can be applied.
TOMM Integration
The CobraGold08 simulator offers a network interface operated over the XMLRPC protocol to allow an outside application to set simulation parameters, run a single simulation, and in return deliver simulation data back to the calling client. QLI provided Alion with example client code to illustrate the use of the interface and to jump-start the integration effort. The medical operator can set important disease parameters, interventions, etc through the TOMM web-based front-end and the Gryphon simulator runs the actual simulation. The data for each simulation step is returned to the TOMM server for the medical operator to analyze with TOMM and to produce reports.
While a simulation is running under external control, the user interface of Gryphon is blocked from direct interaction.
Model Update Tool
A special challenge for the CobraGold08 deliverable is the necessity to update the model throughout the course of the exercise. To provide accurate simulation results, the underlying Gryphon model needs to reflect the actual locations of the military forces over the course of the exercise. Due to the lack of access to the deployed software during the exercise, a simple UI tool has been built to allow a contact person in Taiwan to build and deploy a new model from the daily briefings. The UI basically allows a user to select the location of the modeled military populations based on a simple matrix field.
The newly created models can be pushed to the CobraGold08 simulators on the operators’ workstations via the existing XMLRPC interface and replace the exercise model.
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