Emergency Helicopter Support System

Abstract

Hardly a day passes by without a news headline giving an account of a portion of the national landscape stricken with disaster. In order to effectively combat the increasing complexity and frequency of disasters, such as hurricanes, storms, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks; there exists a need for an emergency helicopter support system (EHS) that assimilates seamlessly into a network centric information management structure (CIMS). The CIMS is necessary for the purpose of coordinating the dispatch and communication between civilian and military ground and air forces and maximizing the utilization of the scarce emergency response resources. The CIMS will furnish reports to the appropriate law enforcement organization and stakeholders regarding the emergency operations and recommendations for the future. Because our project significantly relies on deployment of helicopters, EHS must comply with all safety regulations so that the frequency of accidents diminishes with the implementation of a successful emergency helicopter support system. EHS will need to make specific information available to helicopter operators and crews including: incident location, nature and scale of incident, local weather conditions, and any dangerous conditions or other vital landing zone information. Ensuring that our system adheres to the above safety regulations will result in increased probability of successful rescue missions. Our model output focuses on our project's outmost figure of merit, the response time. EHST analysis incorporates two alternative designs of the EHS using the modeling and simulation software, ARENA. Design alternatives will include size of jurisdiction and placement of emergency support command centers. In addition, analysis will include the cost and benefit of implementing mobile landing surfaces versus the use of landing zones already available. The combined calculations will determine the most efficient organizational structure for the emergency helicopter support system. All modeling scenarios will be done to focus on the occurrence of an earthquake in the San Francisco Bay area with a magnitude above 6.7 on the Richter scale