MITRE and Cornell are Engineering Ideas for the National Capital Region

October 2010

In the congested Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, making emergency evacuation less cumbersome is a major concern. What if engineering students from a prestigious university had ideas on how that could be addressed? What if they had a chance to develop their ideas by joining forces with a company like MITRE?

It's actually happening.

For the past three years, members of MITRE's Operations Research and Systems Analysis department—known informally as the "ORmadillos"—have worked with students from Cornell's School of Operations Research and Information Engineering on a project aimed at improving emergency evacuation of the National Capital Region. It's the latest result of a partnership years in the making between MITRE and Cornell and an example of the company's efforts to mentor the next generation of engineers and bring the best of their ideas to bear for the federal government.

"It's a two-way street," says Matt Olson, a lead operations research analyst. "We're able to give them real-world problems with government stakeholders to which they apply their education, and we leverage their understanding and harness their creativity and grasp of the current technological areas."

The partnership with Cornell dates back to 2000, when MITRE's Rick Rudman, an executive director in the Center for Connected Government, returned to his alma mater (bachelor of science, electrical engineering, class of 1977) as its MITRE liaison. Since then, Rudman has spoken at several Cornell technical forums, helped convene lessons-learned sessions from MITRE's and Cornell's independent involvement in the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Grand Challenge, and coordinated faculty visits to MITRE labs and Washington D.C.-area tech facilities.

In 2006, MITRE began co-sponsoring design projects for Cornell's masters of engineering students (who are usually required to complete such a project in lieu of a thesis). After the first project—which involved staff from MITRE's Operations Research and Systems Analysis group—Cornell's MITRE mentors decided, in Rudman's words, to "find a project that would have results potentially useful to our customers and help build a bridge between their needs and the skills the students were developing."

A project on the emergency evacuation of Washington, D.C. seemed an ideal way to meet that goal. Moreover, it was connected with work that Mike French, head of MITRE's Critical Infrastructure Protection Department, has previously done with the Department of Homeland Security.

This map shows the model evacuation network Cornell University students developed for emergency evacuation of the Washington D.C. area. The colors are approximations of U.S. Census Bureau tracts along the Interstate 66 corridor, allowing estimates of transportation system demand in the event of full-scale evacuation. Red dots represent bus pick-up points which might speed evacuation, while the blue lines converging at a single point on top are an artifact of a technique to model traffic flow.

Through a collaboration with MITRE's research portfolio in Emergency Preparedness and Response, MITRE and the Cornell students developed a working prototype model that simulates resource requirements and constraints associated with a mass evacuation of vehicle traffic flows from the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area to surrounding locations. Next, a prototype of a regional decision support system was developed with a simulation model that can evaluate what tradeoffs would be needed to make different evacuation options work. The purpose of this ongoing, exploratory research is to help planners determine command, control, communications, and logistical requirements that will allow them to more effectively employ existing resources in preparing and training for an event. That, in turn, will allow for more effective investment strategies.

And this project may not be the last time these Cornell students see MITRE.

"We have hired some graduates from this program," says Eric Blair, a principal operations research analyst. "They tend to be very qualified individuals. This program has a long history of producing good operations research talent."

—by Russell Woolard

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