Looking Glass

Looking Glass enables the discovery of a city’s vulnerabilities in a scenario along with the exploration of alternative resolutions and their accompanying side effects. It is a tool for enabling city officials to bridge the silos defined by people, processes, and organizations; the decision support framework can be used to discover interdependencies between a city’s infrastructure elements, its protocols (procedures) and its people’s actions over time. It is a tool for preparedness planning for natural and man-made threats, providing visualization of scenarios as they unfold, allowing observation and measurement of the effects of ad-hoc decisions. Looking Glass is a dynamic data driven system where the data can be interactively manipulated with the human-in-the-loop module during simulation. In general, the key performance parameters are the time, resources, and cost of resolving an incident, both financial costs and the costs associated with the health, safety, and happiness of the population. A prototype was demonstrated to city and county officials who were excited about the benefits of Looking Glass for their organizations.