Abstract
(English)
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The main objective of the A-TEAM project is to improve the learning and education process in the complex environment of emergency management. The training of emergency management faces the difficulty that realistic experimentation is only possible with a enormous expenditure and personal experience in this domain is scarce. The objective of the A-TEAM project is planned to be achieved by developing and testing an advanced computer based training system integrating modern information technologies like dynamic simulations, visualisations, geographic information systems, expert systems, CBR, artificial intelligence, etc. in an up to date didactical framework using multi-media contents. Using the possibility of computer simulations together with artificial intelligence and virtual reality, the lack of practical experimentation in emergency management can be largely compensated. The new learning and education tool bases on a learning-by-doing concept. In the A-TEAM project, the concept and the architecture of the learning and education tool will be tested in several case studies in different countries. There are test cases in England, Italy, Austria Portugal and Switzerland. ASIT is the responsible consortium partner of the Swiss test case. The Swiss test case will refer to emergency management training in transportation accidents on road or railway with a special focus on tunnel accidents, which has achieved great public interest in the recent past (Mont-Blanc-, Tauern-, Kaprun- and Gotthard-tunnel accidents).The project started with the identification of potential end users of the education system. In Switzerland, the professional and voluntary fire-brigades have been identified as the most important potential end users. In cooperation with leading commanders of big professional fire-brigades, the user requirements for the training tool have been acquired: the tool will be developed for three different levels of a fire-brigade staff (soldiers, officers and commanders). According to the different levelled users within the fire brigade staff, training lessons for the Swiss test case tool are planned to be multimedia tutorial lessons on one hand and scenario-based lessons on the other hand. Elements of the lessons of the first kind, which are normally addressed to soldiers, are multiple choice tests and multimedia contents. In the scenario based lessons, in addition to the base knowledge, application and analyses skills will be trained using special emergency scenario examples. Additional elements in these kind of lessons are computer simulations of specific aspects of emergency situations like gas dispersion, fire- and explosion, heat flow in tunnels, etc.In the first project year, a considerable expenditure was spent for gathering all kind of information on intervention training and tunnels as input parameters for the planned simulations of emergencies in the Swiss test case training tool.In the second year, the work mainly focused on the conception and the technical development of the tool and of first examples of courses. A multimedia tutorial and a scenario-based lesson had been developed. The multimedia tutorial deals with hazards of transportation of dangerous goods. The tutorial will alternate the learning subjects and questions to check the students understanding of the subject. A general test for every subject is also provided. The developed scenario-based lesson comprises all aspects of handling a fire of a road tank lorry carrying petrol in a city environment. Along with the development of the tutorials, a general design of the training tool was developed. This design will be used for all the future courses, lessons and units to be put into the training tool. With the developed multimedia tutorial and subject-based lesson, the didactic effectiveness of the training tool will be evaluated by involving test persons. A further goal of the course -and lesson development is to test the integration of different contributions of the several participants of the project.
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