The Real-time Urban Management System is a system, which is being designed to respond directly to the extremely diverse needs of modern cities and municipalities in their need to understand and manage real-time information and resources. The primary problem that this system will address is the need to facilitate collaboration and sharing of information amongst dissimilar (multi-disciplinary) user groups. The prototype system is being designed to allow information, both static and real-time (or temporal), to be made available, to be visualized and to be shared in an immediate fashion across a very diverse set of user populations, groups and functions. These will include civic departments as well as with society and the community as a whole.
In order to accomplish this objective we intend to focus on three Different application areas. They are:
1) Police emergency response training and situation Assessment for the Los Angeles metro subway system. This application is representative of an intricate urban complex which is normally inaccessible for familiarizing emergency and law enforcement personnel with the environment which they will inevitably find themselves during an emergency situation. It is both difficult and expensive to replicate up for training. The transit police have expressed great interest in collaborating with us in the use of VR techniques in training police personnel for emergency response in the metro stations and tunnels. This task will be carried out in the first half of the Project period along with the technology focus described next.
2) Technology research. The application above will provide the direction and impetus for the research. We will also focus is on the structuring of the system to permit efficient, simple extension and tailoring of the system to new applications as they are identified. The objective is to reduce the need for highly trained experts to build Such applications. Without this capability the proliferation of such systems will be slow indeed. The goal here is to provide the basic concepts (data models, data manipulation primitives, interfaces to external databases, etc.) that permit relatively quick and efficient contruction of new applications.
3) Application of the system to emergency response and training for the Los Angeles International Airport will, in the second half of the project, be the testbed for the authoring system developed under item 2. We feel that the airport will be an ideal site for developing the technology for automatic update of the model from aerial photographs. This is a central part of the proposed research. While actual emergencies (crashes, terrorist attacks, earthquakes, etc.) can not be produced on demand, we will be able to take aerial photographs, register the images with the model and develop the techniques to update the model with, for example, the current positions of planes, location of emergency vehicles, etc. The fact that the airport is also due for some expansion and rennovation during this period will allow the use of a "before" model with some aerial photographs and video to again explore the techniques required to do change analysis an automatic model update. The airport also provides numerous opportunities for real-time feeds on the position of vehicles and personel for example which will be incorporated into the system.
