I-Corps: A web-based simulator of an emergency operations center

University Of Notre Dame, Notre Dame IN

Investigators

Abstract

An Emergency Operations Center (EOC) is a secure location in which upper level emergency managers gather together to prepare for, manage, and coordinate preparation and recovery activities in response to an emergency situation (e.g. hurricane, earthquake, epidemic or outbreak, tsunami). While in-person exercises are the gold standard for training, because of time and cost the frequency of such in-person training events is limited. The I-Corps team has developed a simulator that will enable emergency managers to train more effectively and more frequently in a virtual, distributed environment. The proposed technology will enable better training of emergency managers, potentially resulting in lives saved and reduction of property loss. Through advanced technological training, emergency managers, can train more often, for less cost. When a disaster occurs, emergency personnel set up a management structure called an Incident Command System (ICS) to manage the incident. The personnel in the ICS have to gather information and coordinate among various organizations and across jurisdictions with local, state, and federal agencies. These are complex tasks that require training to ensure that all participants and their organizations are familiar with current plans, policies, agreements and procedures. Such training is typically performed by a range of in-person approaches, including discussion-based tabletop exercises and full-scale operations-based exercises simulating a specific incident with full participation of all responsible organizations. The proposed simulator,SimEOC, can simulate the emergency incident and the distributed web-based participation of all the participating organizations. A centralized web-server will support over 100 trainees in such a training exercise. At the end of the I-Corps immersion curriculum the existing research prototype (alpha version) could be used for a "live-code" proof-of-concept demonstration; optimistically the re-engineered enterprise quality version under current development (beta version) may be ready to preview as well.