Project Overview
Driven by high-end behavioral simulation, cutting-edge visualization and interaction paradigms, and world-class GIS, TARANIS (Technologies for the Appraisal of Risks through Animation and Simulation) aims to research and develop, in collaboration with potential end-users and experts, a crisis management solution. This solution provides: simple planning and crisis management tools, an easy way to build crisis complex scenarios, GIS-based visualization of the entire situation, value for money training and exercising with collaborative sessions potentially available on the web.
Since the end of 2008 a training platform for crisis managers has been deployed in Le Havre, the largest industrial harbor in France. With its 200.000 inhabitants and 18 Seveso-grade industrial sites, Le Havre has been for 10 years a reference in the field of risks prevention and disaster preparedness. Large scale training exercises are already taking place in Le Havre, involving different public safety organizations, political representatives and corporate managers.
The key project figures are:
- Duration: 5 March 2007 – 5 June 2009
- Project number: ANR-06-SECU-012 (funded under the ANR CSOSG-06)
- Strategic objective: Global Security
- Consortium: 3 partners: MASA Group (leader), ESRI France (#1 GIS vendor), LRI (Computer Science lab from Paris-Sud University, focused on Human Machine Interface design).
MASA Group is responsible of:
- The project and technical management of the overall TARANIS project.
- The design of the TARANIS platform, the research and development of the behavioral simulation for crisis management (population, civil protection, civil security modeling).
Thanks to MASA advanced technologies, decision support tools or training simulations are able to take into account the complexity of human behaviors at the individuals or crowd-levels, as well as decisional processes themselves, such as chains of command and doctrine.
Challenges
The ability to react to critical events is a crucial skill for managers facing increasing risks emerging from the complexity of large industrial systems, the interlocking of vulnerable networks, the multiplicity of involved actors, and the uncontrollable effects of media coverage. This ability can only be developed on purpose through managers training.
This training will, on one hand, allow managers to test existing emergency procedures and cooperation between organizations, and, on the other hand, familiarize them with unfamiliar and stressful crisis situations. In fact, such a system tries to fill in a gap, in-between outdoor life-size roleplay, and indoor analysis of predefined scenarios.
Solution
A typical training exercise involves: (i) a crisis cell where the trainees manage a simulated crisis using paper and/or computer-assisted visualizations and databases, and (ii) a simulation room where trainers, animators, and support staff generate the crises to be responded to.
The simulation room is featured with:
- a highly realistic decisional simulation taking into account both operational units behavior and population behavior dealing with the environment and physical events (toxic clouds, water pollutions, etc.);
- a timeline managing the actors with their associated roles and every task or event (simulated or not) defined by the scenario such as a phone call, an e-mail, a video, simulated events, notes, etc.;
- a phone network with its recorded discussions displayed in the timeline.
Modules are available as web services so that exercises can be organized online. All these tools are used during the debriefing and analysis phase with the trainees, thus providing an invaluable learning tool.
TARANIS R&D platform relies on SWORDTM as core simulation while designing and implementing new features :
- Enhance population behavior initially developped in CRIMSON project
- Upgrade behavior database with civil protection and security behavior models
- Enable exploitation of third-part simulation for physical events (CBRN clouds)
- Enable remote users to drive simulation through web services
Key Benefits
- Provide value-for-money crisis manager training in parallel with real-life exercises
- Enable complex scenario creation and evaluation
- Simplify the planning and rehearsal of urban crisis management tasks
- Allow GIS-based visualization for situation awareness and analysis