Our vision is that simulation technology be used to identify, anticipate, prepare for, mitigate, respond to, and recover from emergency. To realize that vision, it must be possible to integrate and execute models and simulation designed for different purposes (e.g., noxious fume path prediction and traffic planning for evacuation) from different jurisdictions (e.g., federal, state, local and private) across disciplines (e.g., medical and law enforcement) and simulation tools.

Because such integration and interoperability is not currently possible, the goal of this conference is to identify barriers to that vision and efforts needed to attain that vision.

The key focus of the conference will be to promote the development of a simulation framework to allow distributed, integrated execution of a broad range of simulation systems and presentation of results that captures the interdependencies among the systems modeled.

The conference will explore:

• simulation opportunities and requirements for emergency response
• what is needed to develop, demonstrate and deploy a framework to enable simulations to share information for homeland defense.

We expect this conference to provide a strong foundation for collaborative follow-on efforts among government agencies, the response community, industry, and academia to:

• identify information sources, simulation systems, and data requirements
• develop the emergency response simulation framework
• develop standards for interoperability and integration
• develop and demonstrate distributed simulations using commercial simulation software and the simulation framework