Grant: Collaborative Research and Training Experience

According to Public Safety Canada ""the rising cost of natural disasters and the financial burden on Ottawa is the country's biggest public safety risk"" for the 2014-2015. At the same time Canada is falling behind in the rapidly growing public safety and emergency management market due to the lack of organized and coordinated training and research. The proposed Advanced Disaster, Emergency, and Rapid Response Simulation (ADERSIM) CREATE industry stream program will enhance Canada's capacities in public safety and emergency management through innovative training, research, and development of professionals in state-of-the-art simulations and emergency management information systems. The ADERSIM program will train 72 next generation of Canadian HQPs with strong interdisciplinary theoretical, technical, and professional skills in advanced and disaster and emergency data mining, information management, modelling, simulations to meet Canada's current and future demands in emergency management and public safety industry. The ADERSIM research will develop customizable, scalable, and easy to use disaster simulations based on an integrated use of the latest developments in Web Data Mining and Information Retrieval, Agent-Based Modelling (ABM), Dynamic and Adaptive Optimization, WebGIS, and 3D Visualization. We organize our research activities into Disaster Risk Simulations and Disaster Planning and Operations Simulations areas. Research and development activities will involve developing state-of-the-art technologies and tools for simulating disaster risks (natural, technological and human made) and disaster planning and operations (i.e. emergency warning and evacuation, impact assessment, search and rescue, disaster logistics, volunteer and donation management, debris management, and recovery and reconstruction planning and monitoring. The research team consists of distinguished national and international academic participants, industrial partners, and end-users.