Large emergency-response exercises: qualitative characteristics - a survey

Exercises, drills, or simulations are widely used, by governments, agencies and commercial organizations, to simulate serious incidents and train staff how to respond to them. International cooperation has led to increasingly large-scale exercises, often involving hundreds or even thousands of participants in many locations. The difference between ‘large’ and ‘small’ exercises is more than one of size: (a) Large exercises are more ‘experiential’ and more likely to undermine any model of reality that single organizations may create; (b) they create a ‘play space’ in which organizations and individuals act out their own needs and identifications, and a ritual with strong social implications; (c) group-analytic psychotherapy suggests that the emotions aroused in a large group may be stronger and more difficult to control. Feelings are an unacknowledged major factor in the success or failure of exercises; (d) successful large exercises help improve the nature of trust between individuals and the organizations they represent, changing it from a situational trust to a personal trust; (e) it is more difficult to learn from large exercises or to apply the lessons identified; (f) however, large exercises can help develop organizations and individuals. Exercises (and simulation in general) need to be approached from a broader multidisciplinary direction if their full potential is to be realized

A Scenario-Based and Game-Based Geographical Information System (GIS) Approach for Earthquake Disaster Simulation and Crisis Mitigation

The current research study aims to introduce the experience of implementing a serious game using the concept of game-based GIS approach for crisis management during earthquake disasters. In this study, we aimed to develop a game-based GIS approach and examine its efficiency for simulating earthquake rescue management in Tabriz city. In designing this game, typical scenario-based, game-based GIS methods and techniques were employed, and the proposed approach was applied to crisis management. To achieve this goal, we addressed the technical details regarding the development and implementation of the scenario-based and game-based GIS approach. Based on the results, game-based simulations can be considered an efficient approach for disaster simulation and can improve the skills of rescue teams. The outcome of this application is an intellectual game that almost all users at any age can play, and the game can challenge their ability to solve critical issues. The results are critical for explaining the effectiveness of rescue teams and crisis management facilities. As we intended to develop an approach for the simulation of earthquake disasters and emergency responses, we therefore conclude that the results of this study can also be employed to improve the skills of rescue teams and citizens for dealing with crises resulting from earthquake disasters. As a result of this research, the developed tool is published, together with this paper, as an open source and can be employed for any scenario-based analysis in other case studies. By presenting a-state-of-the-art approach, the results of this research study can provide significant contribution to further the development of GIScience and its applications for disaster and risk mitigation and management.Deutsche Forschungsgemein-schaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu BerlinPeer Reviewe

Survey: Development and analysis of a games-based crisis scenario generation system

Crisis is an infrequent and unpredictable event which is challenging to prepare and resolve. Serious-game approach proved to provide potential support in training and simulating event of real-world crisis situation to different stakeholders. Yet in practice, the approach meets with difficulty on how to setup and utilize different core components such as asset management, crisis scenario generation, agent simulation, real-world constraints, and the evaluation process to yield beneficial information upon running the system. To address this issue, the key question is what can be done to propose a general crisis game-based framework providing necessary core components while generating evaluation result yielding potential analytical data for a crisis management process. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to review and consolidate the existing research on scenario generation techniques and related crisis simulation framework, then to propose novel solution to combine both processes and to derive a desirable scenario content which is also being validated in the simulation framework based on the JADE multi-agent architecture. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

INTEGRATED COMMUNICATION AND TRANSPORTATION EFFICIENCY – SOME STUDY CASES

A critical factor in search, rescue or criminal investigation is time – specifically, the time needed to complete a big number of tasks that occur in any emergency. A critical asset in assisting disaster relief teams and public safety personnel in their mission to save lives and defend property loss is the access to resources data – location of personnel, emergency service resources, streets, buildings. The ability to locate resources, on foot or in vehicles, in relation to the local transportation infrastructure in a specific geographic area need to be considered in a new way of managing emergency situations. The TETRA based systems integrated with a wide range of mapping, tracking, alarming and resource-allocations applications used in conjunction with a dispatcher tool allows operational teams to manage a large ground, water and air-based emergency teams using voice and text communications.Public Safety, Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre (MRCC), AIS, RIS, Air Traffic Management (ATM), Incident and Operative Scenarios, Operability, Efficiency

An architecture supporting the development of serious games for scenario-based training and its application to Advanced Life Support

The effectiveness of serious games for training has already been proved in several domains. A major obstacle to the mass adoption of serious games comes from the difficulties in their development, due to the lack of widely adopted architectures that could streamline their creation process. In this thesis we present an architecture supporting the development of serious games for scenario-based training, a serious games for medical training we developed exploiting the architecture and the results of a study about its effectivenes

Nuclear Plants and Emergency Virtual Simulations Based on a Low-Cost Engine Reuse

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Designing a user interface for serious games: Observing differences in user response between gamers and non-gamers within the West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service

As entertainment games become an established part of our media, public and private sector companies will look to utilise the benefits of games to train, educate and assess their workforce in engaging ways. This may require a generation unfamiliar with games technology to use them for the first time. As designers we need to consider this, to make sure that the User Interfaces (UI) we create are usable and easily understood to those unfamiliar with the medium. This body of research is a study into the design and testing of a serious game for West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service (WYFRS). Do players of video games develop an understanding of the convention, knowledge and skills over time, which could be seen as a distinct language? – A kind of ‘game literacy.’ If so, then a serious game, which may have a mixed skill group, cannot solely rely on the conventions that work in entertainment games. Therefore, can a recognised UI design process from another discipline be used to develop a serious games UI? To investigate this, Goal-Directed Design is used as a research methodology with a particular focus on the impact learning domain knowledge has on the designer’s ability to create a suitable product for the client. This includes the author undergoing introductory Incident Command training to see the benefits that had on the project. In response to learning the Fire Service’s domain, a prototype product was developed to help the creation and examination of Incident Commanders for the Fire Service. This was then tested on five Fire Officers, of varying ages, to observe how they used and interacted with software unfamiliar to them. This provided an insight into aspects of UIs gamers and non-gamers have problems with and also to see if there is a technological gap between generations. This research suggests there may be a technology generation gap but it is not as polarised as either ‘native’ or ‘immigrant’ but more gradual. Goal Directed Design appears to set out a suitable approach for serious games developers to conduct user research

Giving games a day job: developing a digital game-based resource for journalism training

Computer simulations have been commonplace in some industries such as the military, medicine and science and educators are now actively exploring their potential application to a range of disciplines. Educators and trainers have looked to the multi-billion dollar computer and video game industry for inspiration, and Marc Prensky (2001) has used the phrase digital game-based learning to describe this emerging learning and teaching framework. The purpose of this research project is to produce an Internet-delivered newsgathering/newswriting training package that can be used for an expanding, and increasingly visually literate, tertiary journalism eduction field. This thesis comprises two parts: a) the written component which describes the production of the hypertext-based journalism training scenario and, b) a prototype copy of the training scenario on CD-ROM. The Flood scenario depicts the flooding of a fictional city called Lagoon, and is based on real news stories, media releases and audio-visual material gathered during major floods in the Central West of NSW in August 1990. In its present form Flood is designed as a multi-path learning narrative, which participants must pursue and unravel in their search for news stories. My intention has been to develop a more engaging activity than is currently the case for many traditional, paper-based, approaches to journalism training exercises. Flood is also specifically designed for flexible delivery via the Internet or CD-ROM. This approach makes it especially well suited for both on-campus and distance education students. The Flood resource is at this stage a limited prototype designed as a teaching aid. A theoretical framework combining the roles of researchers and producer is discussed in the thesis. An overview of the use of simulations in journalism education contextualises the practical project, and the place of Web-based scenario simulation within an emerging teaching framework digital game-based learning is considered. There is also an examination of historical precedents for the application of technology in Australian journalism classrooms. The Flood prototype has been trailed at Charles Sturt University with on-campus undergraduate students in 2001 and 2002, and with distance education postgraduate students in 2002. Descriptions of these trials, and details of the student feedback, are provided. This project also includes an experimental narrative element, the use of a software artificial intelligence character known as a chatterbox to explore possibilities for providing a more personal and engaging experience. One of the key design intentions of this project has been consideration of ways to allow participants to develop their own lines of questioning, rather than forcing them to simply follow pre-determined paths. The thesis concludes that digital materials such as the Flood package are worthy of future development to complement the face-to-face instruction in reporting tasks, internships and classroom simulations traditionally used in journalism education and training. Computer simulations are a means for providing students with a controlled exposure to the journalistic process. However, simulation and reality are clearly two different experiences, and digital game-based learning in its present form does not provide a complete substitute for journalism as it is practised in the workplace

Shipboard Crisis Management: A Case Study.

The loss of the "Green Lily" in 1997 is used as a case study to highlight the characteristics of escalating crises. As in similar safety critical industries, these situations are unpredictable events that may require co-ordinated but flexible and creative responses from individuals and teams working in stressful conditions. Fundamental skill requirements for crisis management are situational awareness and decision making. This paper reviews the naturalistic decision making (NDM) model for insights into the nature of these skills and considers the optimal training regimes to cultivate them. The paper concludes with a review of the issues regarding the assessment of crisis management skills and current research into the determination of behavioural markers for measuring competence

Scenario Generation with Cellular Automaton for Game-based Crisis Simulation System

Crisis is infrequent and unpredictable event which is challenging to prepare and resolve. Scenario generation for modeling a crisis using computational approach is preferable due to its flexibility to produce automated variation of scenario based on different setup key factors. Combining crisis generation with game technology, serious-game game can be developed to provide potential support in training and simulation practice of real-world crisis situation to different stakeholders. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a computational framework to provide automated generation of a fire crisis scenario with firefighter-agent simulation using cellular automaton with influence map for agent behavior optimization, and visualization using a 3D game engine. The framework is evaluated based on performance, convergence and realistic behavior of both crisis event (e.g. fire propagation or control) and crisis resolution (e.g. firefighter solving the crisis)