Advanced Training Environment for Crisis Scenarios

Michele Cornacchia atKeeping the Wheel in Motion: Workshop BCManager - ANRA

Business Continuity, Incident and Crisis Management21st October 2010, Milan, Italy

Keeping the Wheel in Motion 2

Consortium

Keeping the Wheel in Motion 3

Pandora’s people at kick-off

Keeping the Wheel in Motion 4

PANDORA project• Crisis management is a major issue to prevent emergency

situations from turning into disasters. • Training plays an important function to the preparation of

the crisis manager. • Currently main modalities for training purpose are two:

table top exercise and real world simulation exercise.

• PANDORA will bridge the gap between table-top exercises and real world simulation exercises, providing a near-real training environment at affordable cost.

• In a real-time, physics-based environment, PANDORA authentically simulates all the dynamic elements of the entire disaster environment. PANDORA will emulate a complete crisis room: realistic 3D visuals and audio create a truly immersive, chaotic and stressful environment.

Keeping the Wheel in Motion 5

PANDORA focus• The focus on the emotional status of the crises manager

– continuity planners worked under a simple assumption: when a disaster strikes, people will follow plans and procedures;

– this idea fails considering the often-surprising behaviour of people during emergencies

• Traditional business continuity plans do not adequately take to into account the many forces of human behaviour.

• Planners often wrongly assume that the organization’s emergency plans will be automatically accepted, understood and acted upon by all.

• Behaviour of individuals and groups is shaped more by numerous intangible factors.

Keeping the Wheel in Motion 6

PANDORA environment

• It will take in full account the behavioural status of crises managers and react to it.

• The environment will be not totally automated but will be populated by several actors, among which a simulation director and some extras participating to de-structured simulations with third parties.

• It will be possible also to carry out training contemporary to many crisis managers of different sectors.

Keeping the Wheel in Motion 7

PANDORA aspects• The main innovative aspects of the project are

reported below, divided in two main categories – Innovation in training management

• Realism and complexity of the simulated model; • Chance of simulating and analyzing also behavioural

aspects, related to stress management; • Analysis and Reporting on the behaviour showed during the

training. – Innovation in technological aspects

• Modelling of the behaviour during the crisis management; • Modelling of crisis and its evolutions; • Ability to create the user experience until the reproduction

of emotional status; • Ability to create multiple interconnected training

procedures.

Keeping the Wheel in Motion 8

Pandora box• The project will create an environment that can provide

appropriate metrics on the performance of a crisis manager actively engaged in the management of a crisis, with the environment providing:

– A realistic and complete scenario with near real-time action, coherent with that expected in a real-world situation;

– Realistic emotional status, through affective inputs (emotional statuses: fear, irritation, joy) and stress factors (pressure to decision, fragmentary information, short time to decide);

– The potential to include different crises managers belonging to different sectors.

Keeping the Wheel in Motion 9

Consortium strategic choices• Severe weather scenario • Crisis room at EPC, York, UK • Use_cases

– Single site training – Deployed training – Distributed training

Keeping the Wheel in Motion 10

Use cases

Single site training Deployed training

Distributed training

Keeping the Wheel in Motion 11

Pandora logical

Keeping the Wheel in Motion 12

The Pandora boxes• Behaviour simulation and modelling,

– the objective is to create and update a model of each trainee able to represent trainee’s feature and actual behaviour as well as to provide indications on how to personalize training.

• Crisis simulation and modelling, – which aims to combine the information coming from the previous sub-

system and the knowledge about the critical, infrastructure domain in order to create a crisis scenario evolution to be simulated.

• Environment and emotion simulation, – which aims to effectively represents non–player characters and

environments for the simulation.• Crisis room,

– which is the "place" where the exercise is conducted, may be complete, portable or web, according to the selected use case.

• One of the main achievements of the PANDORA system is the presence of the retroaction:

– that means that the trainer and the trainees (through their decisions) can modify the scenario at runtime.

Keeping the Wheel in Motion 13

Description of the work

• To achieve the aims of the PANDORA project, the workload has been broken down into 9 Work Packages scheduled as in the GANTT below.

Keeping the Wheel in Motion 14

Thank you!