Critical Incident management training System using an Interactive Simulation environment

SEVENTH FRAMEWORK PROGRAMME THEME 10: SECURITY

Concept and objectives

We aim to research and develop a crisis management train-on-demand and simulation platform we shall refer to as CRISIS. The goals of this Collaborative Project are to research and develop in Europe:

1)  A training and simulation environment that will focus on real-time decision making and response to simulated but realistic crises or critical incidents, focusing primarily on problem diagnosis, planning, re-planning, and acting, rather than just procedural training or familiarity with policies;

2)  A distributed, secure, scalable, collaborative and interactive simulation and on-demand training environment for crisis management training in airports, of individuals, teams, and teams of teams, working across multiple levels of an organisation, between organisations, and across different nations at command post levels;

3)  A software architecture that will be capable of being readily re-configured and used for different scenarios at other airports, transport hubs, and other critical sites like power plants or factories;

4)  A flexible platform that can also function as a test-bed and evaluation tool for new and current operational procedures, information sharing and planning tools.

 

Project stages

The project will be executed over a 36-month period in 3 stages.

The first stage is characterised by a spiral concept development cycle where mock-ups and existing prototypes will be used with limited interactivity to illustrate the full CRISIS approach. This will facilitate very early end user comments and ensure high quality user requirements specification and a realistic operational concept accepted by the end users.

In the second stage the design and development of the components of the CRISIS simulation environment will take place. Running alongside the technology development and training development threads, the prototype will be informed by insights derived from our research thread into crisis management decision support and advanced interaction technology. Halfway through this stage an early evaluation is planned in combination with a training session (for the individual operator) to give early feedback to the end users. The end users will so be able to adjust the components in the CRISIS simulation environment during the development and before the final integration starts.

In the third stage the components will be integrated into a secure architecture together with supporting tools.