Publications

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While climate-change models have done a reasonable job of forecasting changes in global climate conditions over the past decades, recent data indicate that actual climate change may be much more severe. To better understand some of the potential economic impacts of these severe climate changes, Sandia economists estimated the impacts to the U.S. economy of climate change-induced impacts to U.S. precipitation over the 2010 to 2050 time period. The economists developed an impact methodology that converts changes in precipitation and water availability to changes in economic activity, and conducted simulations of economic impacts using a large-scale macroeconomic model of the U.S. economy.

This report gives an overview of the types of economic methodologies and models used by Sandia economists in their consequence analysis work for the National Infrastructure Simulation & Analysis Center and other DHS programs. It describes the three primary resolutions at which analysis is conducted (microeconomic, mesoeconomic, and macroeconomic), the tools used at these three levels (from data analysis to internally developed and publicly available tools), and how they are used individually and in concert with each other and other infrastructure tools.

Staggered bioterrorist attacks with aerosolized pathogens on population centers present a formidable challenge to resource allocation and response planning. The response and planning will commence immediately after the detection of the first attack and with no or little information of the second attack. In this report, we outline a method by which resource allocation may be performed. It involves probabilistic reconstruction of the bioterrorist attack from partial observations of the outbreak, followed by an optimization-under-uncertainty approach to perform resource allocations. We consider both single-site and time-staggered multi-site attacks (i.e., a reload scenario) under conditions when resources (personnel and equipment which are difficult to gather and transport) are insufficient. Both communicable (plague) and non-communicable diseases (anthrax) are addressed, and we also consider cases when the data, the time-series of people reporting with symptoms, are confounded with a reporting delay. We demonstrate how our approach develops allocations profiles that have the potential to reduce the probability of an extremely adverse outcome in exchange for a more certain, but less adverse outcome. We explore the effect of placing limits on daily allocations. Further, since our method is data-driven, the resource allocation progressively improves as more data becomes available.

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Based primarily on the results of a month-long experiment and a crisis management exercise, synchronous multimedia collaboration within a taskoriented, time-constrained distributed team appears to exhibit three layers of structure. The first layer is episodic, and results in collections of related multimedia collaboration artifacts that can be called "chapters" or "scenes" in the collaboration. The second layer is the multivalent nature of collaboration, in which collaboration conversations at multiple subgroup levels take place at the same time. The third, top-level, layer is the agenda that drives the collaboration. The implications for the design of synchronous collaboration systems are that multiple views, representations, and metaphors for this conversation structure are needed. Chapter views, subgroup views, and agenda views are presented as alternative packaging mechanisms and entry points into the collaboration data. Other metaphors and presentations include the collaboration tree and infinitely recursive conference room, as well as network graphs of subgroup structure and agenda-based group awareness. © 2006 IEEE.

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Concepts from Complexity Science are valuable and allow a simulation approach for critical infrastructures that is flexible and has wide ranging applications.

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The nation's electric power sector is highly interdependent with the economic sectors it serves; electric power needs are driven by economic activity while the economy itself depends on reliable and sustainable electric power. To advance higher level understandings of the vulnerabilities that result from these interdependencies and to identify the loss prevention and loss mitigation policies that best serve the nation, the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center is developing and using N-ABLE{trademark}, an agent-based microeconomic framework and simulation tool that models these interdependencies at the level of collections of individual economic firms. Current projects that capture components of these electric power and economic sector interdependencies illustrate some of the public policy issues that should be addressed for combined power sector reliability and national economic security.

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Acts of terrorism could have a range of broad impacts on an economy, including changes in consumer (or demand) confidence and the ability of productive sectors to respond to changes. As a first step toward a model of terrorism-based impacts, we develop here a model of production and employment that characterizes dynamics in ways useful toward understanding how terrorism-based shocks could propagate through the economy; subsequent models will introduce the role of savings and investment into the economy. We use Aspen, a powerful economic modeling tool developed at Sandia, to demonstrate for validation purposes that a single-firm economy converges to the known monopoly equilibrium price, output, and employment levels, while multiple-firm economies converge toward the competitive equilibria typified by lower prices and higher output and employment. However, we find that competition also leads to churn by consumers seeking lower prices, making it difficult for firms to optimize with respect to wages, prices, and employment levels. Thus, competitive firms generate market ''noise'' in the steady state as they search for prices and employment levels that will maximize profits. In the context of this model, not only could terrorism depress overall consumer confidence and economic activity but terrorist acts could also cause normal short-run dynamics to be misinterpreted by consumers as a faltering economy.

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