Forward and Inverse Simulations with Finnish Emergency Model Silam

Abstract

An evolution of the term “emergency modeling” to a large extent reflects the evolution of the other term: “public safety”. The starting point was the Chernobyl catastrophe, when comparably safe plant suddenly turned to be one of the biggest threat to public health and life around European continent. Since then, it has become evident that the list of potentially dangerous installations can be extended further and further. The new threats of terrorists applying supposedly well-controlled agents like biological weapon or “non-standard” arms like dirty bomb, are forcing the scientists and decision- making authorities to review the methods and instruments used for the information support of the decision-making. In particular, it may appear that the source of the dangerous agent is not linked to any existing installation or simply unknown. Second, the net of potential sources is so dense that there can be no time to run the model to estimate the area of risk — it has to be known “in advance”. Current paper presents some of possible responses to these challenges implemented in the modeling framework SILAM.