An innovative approach for tool-based field-exercise support to gain improved preparedness in emergency response

In order to maintain a high level of preparedness, rescue operations need to be trained regularly. In this article, we present a tool which is to support rescue organizations in the execution and analysis of such exercises. IT-based gathering and exploitation of data describing relevant aspects of the exercise is well-suited for this task, in particular with respect to data preparation and visualization. A reasonable presentation of the exercise results allows to identify deficiencies and thus to identify measures for improvement. Hence, in this paper we present how the tool may be deployed in an exercise, which data is handled by the system and how the corresponding user interfaces are designed.