Simulation of Suicide Bombing
Using Computers to Save Lives
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Hardly a day passes without a television or newspaper story about a horrific suicide bombing. On average, a politically or religiously motivated attack takes place every six days somewhere in the world and the impacts are often devastating for the families and communities involved. Although suicide bombings account for only 3% of the terrorist attacks around the world, they claim 48% of the total deaths. Between 2004 and 2009 there were almost 700 bombing incidents in Iraq and 200 in Pakistan alone. In early 2006, my doctoral student and Fulbright scholar, Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, and I began to address the significant lack of modeling capability to simulate and reconstruct suicide bombing events. My expertise was in modeling and simulation of blast-induced traumatic brain injury, and Zeeshan was a talented and motivated computer scientist from Pakistan. We felt that if an advanced computer simulation tool was created to model suicide bombing events it could be used to save lives through better disaster management, triage of patients, and emergency resource allocation. This book is a result of our collaborative efforts to develop such a tool. The comprehensive simulation platform we developed to model suicide bombing events is the first of its kind, and also includes comparisons of the results of our simulations against a database of past suicide bombing events in Pakistan. The simulation tool, called BlastSim, takes into account factors such as crowd pattern, density, shielding and demographics, geography and landscape in which the attack takes place, as well as details regarding the bomb, such as explosive energy content, overpressure and phase decay behavior of the explosive material and the shrapnel and fragment damage which may occur. The tool makes use of and compares an array of well-documented explosive and injury models, which are intelligently applied to various scenarios. The results of the various model combinations are then correlated against a statistical database. BlastSim allows the user to develop optimized crowd patterns to minimize the impact of a potential suicide bomber, study model sensitivity to any input/control parameter, and plan for emergency medical action strategies. The simulation can also be used to re-create the bombing event for forensic analyses. Furthermore, the tool also has the capability to calculate the economic impact of a bombing in various locations around the world including potential impact to gross domestic product and cost to the government to take care of injured individuals. The work presented in the volume is multidisciplinary in its nature and includes modeling and simulation (platform for tool development), computational physics (simulation of blast-waves and pulse duration, dynamics of explosives in open and confined spaces), computational geometry (partial and full blockers within a crowd, smart rendering of scenes), computer graphics (modeling of virtual crowds), psychology (mob behavior, diffusion of rumors and stampede), and economics (cost impact of a bombing event). The BlastSim can predict the number of dead and injured in a suicide bombing incident with 87% accuracy. Line-of-sight with an attacker, rushing towards an exit, announcing the threat of a suicide bombing, sitting inside a vehicle or building, and standing closer to a wall or a rigid surface were found to be the most lethal choices both during and after an attack. The findings can have implications for emergency response and counter terrorism. The BlastSim tool has attracted the interest of numerous agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Army, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, as well as agencies from other countries. Finally it is our sincere hope that this research will continue to provide further motivation, direction, and interest from academia, government, and industry to investigate suicide bombing attacks in hopes of making the world a safer place.
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About the Book
This book introduces BlastSim – a physics-based simulation platform to model and simulate suicide bombing events. The BlastSim software is designed to test, analyze, and validate the results of different explosive and injury model combinations under various conditions with different sets of parameters, such as explosive and crowd formation characteristics, blockage and human shielding effects, fragmentation and shrapnel, and the bomber’s position in 2- and 3-dimensional environments. The suicide bombing event can also be re-created for forensic analysis. The number of fatalities and injured after a suicide bombing event can be predicted using this software with 91% accuracy. The assessment of an explosion’s effect on a crowd can lead to better management of disasters, triage of patients, locating blast victims under the debris, development of protective gear, and safe distance recommendations to reduce casualties.
About the Author
Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani Dr. Usmani is a Fulbright Scholar. He holds a PhD and MS in Computer Science from the Florida Institute of Technology. As part of his Master’s thesis, he has developed a simulation of supermarkets to observe and quantify the effects of herd behavior on impulse shopping by customers. His PhD work focuses on simulation and modeling of blast waves in open and confined spaces. His work has been mentioned in Wall Street Journal, AOL News, Wired Magazine, NPR, MIT’s Technology Review, Florida Today, and The Economist. He has authored dozens of research papers, articles, and three books. His research strengths include real-world simulation, programming human emergent behaviors, and modeling of catastrophic events. He has worked in Citi Bank New York, Discover Financials, Illinois, Fulbright Academy of Science and Technology in Maine, and at the department of computer science at GIK Institute, Topi, Pakistan. Currently, he is working as a Chief of Research at Interactive Group in Islamabad, where he lives with his wife and three kids.
Daniel Kirk Dr. Daniel R. Kirk is an associate professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the Florida Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Florida Tech in 2004, he completed his doctorate of philosophy (Ph.D.) and a post-doctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics under a National Science Foundation Fellowship. Prior to his graduate work at MIT, he was the Valedictorian of the class of 1997 at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he majored in mechanical engineering with minors in astronomy and philosophy. Dr. Kirk’s research interests focus on propulsion, combustion, and blast-structure interactions. He has produced over 50 conference and journal publications, served as a visiting scholar at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and NASA Kennedy Space Center and has managed research projects with NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and the Office of Naval Research. Dr. Kirk has won numerous teaching awards, culminating in 2008 with the prestigious Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Ralph A. Teetor award for integration of research and teaching. In 2009 he was selected as a Boeing Welliver Faculty Fellow. Dr. Kirk is a member of the America Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), SAE, Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, and Tau Beta Pi, the National Engineering Honor Society. Dr. Kirk enjoys studying the Polish and Russian languages, playing baseball, tennis, surfing, snowboarding, chess, and he is currently training to compete in his 7th marathon.