Abstract for:HealthSim: A Management Flight Simulator to Support Resource Collaborative Decision Making for Pandemic Preparedness

With the convergence of risk factors driving disease emergence, the amplification and spread of pandemic prone pathogens pose a significant threat to mankind. Public health professionals require tools to help understand the dynamics of disease spread, and the impact resources and collaborative behaviour can have in order to mitigate against potentially adverse outcomes. HealthSim is an interactive, distributed, role-playing management flight simulator, which allows participants to explore key issues related to pandemic preparedness. The system design was informed by a series of workshops with public health professionals, and the implementation is based on open source visualisation and client/server technologies. The paper presents the background and rationale for HealthSim, the underlying spatial simulation model, the system architecture and initial tests and evaluation. Future work is discussed, whereby HealthSim can have a role as (1) as interactive simulator to support public health professionals, and (2) as a experimental laboratory to assess how decision makers perform in dynamic collaborative resource sharing scenarios.