Contact: Phil Hearn
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Mississippi State engineers are working on a homeland security project aimed at thwarting terrorist threats on U.S. inland waterways.
A joint research project between the university and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory seeks to devise a computer tracking and monitoring model that will identify in real time riverine-based barges and other vessels carrying potentially dangerous cargoes.
Armed with a $441,000 research grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, MSU's department of industrial and systems engineering, which is headed by Royce Bowden, will begin developing and field-testing a prototype system early next year.
"The proposed system will alert decision-makers to possible security threats by identifying strange carriers, strange destinations and deviations from pre-trip plans, including schedules and routes," said ISE assistant professor Mingzhou Jin.
"It is expected to provide early warnings of terrorism related to barge-carried cargoes designated as dangerous by DHS and share the warnings with state, regional and local leaders for better decision-making in disaster prevention and response," added Jin, principal investigator for the two-year project.
Some 800,000 daily shipments of hazardous materials are viewed as a major threat to U.S. security because they can be used by terrorists as weapons of mass destruction. Nearly a billion tons of such materials are moved by water annually.
In response to increased terrorist threats related to hazardous material movements on the U.S. inland waterway system, towing vessel operators and fleet area managers at specified reporting points are required to notify the U.S. Coast Guard's Inland River Vessel Movement Center of moving barges carrying certain dangerous cargoes.
Those cargoes might include certain explosives, blasting agents, poisonous gas, oxidizing materials, liquid materials, radioactive, or fissile materials, bulk liquefied chlorine gas, and other flammable or toxic materials designated as threatening by DHS.
Bowden said the current reporting process is manual--telephone, fax or e-mail--and cannot identify and monitor barges with dangerous cargoes in real time. The proposed system is expected to automatically track and monitor those barges and communicate the real-time information to a computer data server, he said.
"The system we are developing is expected to help reduce workload and errors caused by manual document processes," explained Jin, whose department is a part of the Bagley College of Engineering.
Analyzed results will be visually displayed via a Geographic Information System to facilitate security preparedness by local law officers and other first responders, he said.
"An information fusion system also will analyze real-time data to identify potential security threats and share that information with other government agencies such as state departments of transportation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers," Jin noted.
A major MSU task during the first year of the project will be a review of dangerous cargo flows on the Mississippi and Tennessee-Tombigbee river systems to determine possible field-test sites.
"The integrated system will be fully tested and evaluated under various operational environments in the second year," said Bowden, also a research participant.
Other MSU researchers involved in the project are ISE professor John Usher, civil and environmental engineering professor William McAnally, and research associate Michael Parsons of the university's Institute for Clean Energy Technology.
Other cooperating organizations include the American Waterways Operators, Waterways Council, port authorities, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Coast Guard, Mississippi Department of Transportation, Mississippi Office of Homeland Security, and individual barge companies.
NEWS EDITORS/DIRECTORS: For more information, contact Dr. Jin at 662-325-3923 or mjin@ise.msstate.edu.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.