Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry
TARANIS: Technologies for the Appraisal of Risks through Animation and Simulation
Participants : Pierre Dragicevic [ correspondant ] , Julie Stromer, Johan Euphrosine.
The TARANIS 2-year ANR project (program “Concepts, systèmes et outils pour la sécurité globale”) started in 2006, supported by MASA, ESRI-France and INRIA. It aims at creating a new training system for crisis managers, based on innovative simulation tools, allowing trainers to easily recreate complex crisis situations. Simulation tools give the trainer unprecedented control over the training session while making the virtual crisis reactive to the trainees actions and providing an unlimited variety of extreme crisis situations, a challenge that even very expensive ground exercises cannot meet. TARANIS is a “Global Security” project conducted by the company “Mathématique Appliquée S.A.” to design crisis simulation environment.
The goal of the Aviz team in this project is to design graphical user interfaces and visualization tools for improving the quality of crisis training exercices. To this end, we have been working closely with MASA Group and members of the CODAH (Communauté de l'agglomération havraise), who are regularly organizing crisis management exercices to train people who could be involved in a civil crisis in the city of Le Havre. We conducted observational studies and participatory design sessions in Le Havre, which together suggested that the quality of the training exercices can be significantly improved by 1) increasing group activity awareness during the exercise and 2) adding logging mechanisms to enhance feedback to the trainees during the final debriefing session.
With these two goals in mind, we designed and implemented an augmented crisis animation setup in order to assist the animators in their tasks without significantly changing their working habits. This setup includes:
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A collaborative interactive timeline visualization, which allows animators to see the evolution of the scenario in real-time, assign tasks and change their status, and add annotations they can reuse during their debriefing session. This timeline relies on a client-server architecture that has been developed together with MASA, and supports multiple displays and multiple sources of input. The current setup uses a shared (projected) display as output, a tablet PC, a wireless keyboard and a jog dial as input, and an additional client laptop for the observer.
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A phone conversation logging mechanism, which records all communications occurring between the animation room and the crisis room, and allows the animators to replay and comment on conversations during the debriefing session.
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A simulation and GIS tools, developed by MASA and ESRI-France.
The augmented crisis animation room has been tested during several crisis training exercices and received very positive feedback; it has now become accepted as an improvement of the training process.
For more information, see http://www.aviz.fr/taranis and http://www.masagroup.net/solutions/customer-cases/taranis.html .
