Both are necessary in his global approach to making infrastructure models for government officials who respond to hot spots domestically and overseas. Still waiting As yet, the Energy Department lab has no paying customers for the decision-support technology. But Engi is convinced the work his team is doing with dynamic simulation language models will prove invaluable to U.S. and international policy-makers. That's where a machine comes in handy.
Users draw simple pictures of the infrastructures they want to model.
Links between variables are rendered as differential equations describing the rate of change of one variable as a function of the other. Infrastructure models, integrated with other models, could help policy-makers see how to maintain supplies of valued commodities such as water and grain while disrupting supplies of negative commodities such as infectious diseases or weapons of mass destruction. David Harris, the project's technical leader, has integrated separate water, grain, energy and greenhouse gas models into a single infrastructure model with data flowing back and forth. Changing agricultural parameters directly affects the output of greenhouse gases. From the model, the Sandia research team demonstrated to policy-makers that they probably need not worry about Chinese demand for grain imports exceeding the world's grain export capacity in the next 10 years.