EMERGENCY RESPONSE TRAINING USING NEW TECHNOLOGIES

摘要

Emergency response management in the chemical industry is an important area which has the potential to benefit from recent technical progress in accident scenario modelling, artificial intelligence and other computing and education technologies. Emergency response training, in particular, is thought to be an area which is particularly suited to the use of new educational and software technologies. There has been some research and development work in this subject during the last few years with variable success. A review of relevant approaches and tools is presented with emphasis on emergency training. Is the current technology mature enough to provide useful help to the chemical industry? The industry is currently experimenting to find out more. This paper introduces a international research project, aiming at improving training in serious technological emergencies resulting from chemical production and transportation. The new training approach makes use of a real-time expert system, dynamic consequence simulation, Geographical Display Systems and Multi-media within a client-server architecture. The integration of these features to create realistic interactive emergency scenarios is summarised. The training methodology relies on a wide participation of users from the chemical industry. A user-requirement analysis was conducted with detailed questionnaires and interviews. The results of the analysis are presented, including functional requirements and the legal and institutional context. The emergency training methodology will be tested with customised training cases in five countries. An example of a training case is presented to illustrate the possible tool contents and the associated design process.