HLARTI based emergency preparedness and response training simulation

Abstract

Many wake-up calls have been received for emergency response, due to natural disasters such as hurricanes, fires or man-made incidents, for example: oil and chemical spills, city bombings, and the terrorist attacks of 9-11. The emergency responders need to work in a coordinated, well-planned manner to best mitigate the impact of an emergency incident. Simulation systems as valuable tools provide a wider range of training at a much lower expense for emergency preparedness and response, and can be used for vulnerability assessment, organizing, educating and decision support. This is identified as the only feasible approach when it is difficult to emulate real-life experiences. This thesis presents an emergency evacuation training simulation, taking the demonstrative example of the SITE building of the University of Ottawa. The objective of the research is to design a multi-user distributed simulator to conduct the safety training in the scenarios of emergent evacuation. The real-time interaction and collaboration, in the simulation, among the users are achieved over HLA/RTI, the IEEE standard for distributed simulation and modeling.