Towards the next generation training system for crisis management

Training plays a central role to improve the skills and responsiveness of crisis managers during critical situations. Well-trained crisis managers can handle crisis more thoroughly and effectively, especially when critical infrastructures and cascading effects need to be considered. Current training approaches are mainly based on real world exercises, which are in general difficult and time-consuming to organise and to perform. Modern technologies like computer modelling simulation and real-time communication over Internet provide a promising alternative to perform training in a more efficient and cost-effective way. This is particularly important for cross-border training where people from different countries need to participate. In this paper we propose a novel system architecture for building such next generation training systems for crisis management. This architecture embraces federated modelling and simulation technology to provide system dynamics of real world infrastructures like electrical networks, telecommunication networks and flooding developments, etc. Real-time communication is integrated into this architecture to enable collaborations for distributed training. Under simulated crisis situations, both spatial and temporal aspects of critical infrastructures elements can be handled and presented in a standard and consistent manner. Mitigation actions issued by crisis managers are performed in a simulated environment with complete rollback support (what-if analysis). Furthermore, impacts and consequences of cascading effects caused by the actions can be analysed according to different criteria in a transparent way.