Effective emergency management calls for trained managers
The Environment for Team, Organizational and Individual Learning in industry (ETOILE) is a system aimed at training executives to handle emergency situations, from a managerial point of view. This is achieved by creating a virtual reality environment in which the trainee is confronted with an emergency situation. The environment can simulate various industrial sectors in a realistic way, thus eliminating the need for drill based training. It offers several options, such as single or team action and artificial intelligent agents to stand in for some of the emergency response teams, supported by shared mental models. The training may well refer to a single person, a team, or a whole organization, and cover any time span from 15 minutes to several hours. ETOILE consists of two parts. The core, namely the runtime platform that handles the actual training administration, the creation of the virtual environment, the loading and execution of the training scenario and the rest of the housekeeping tasks like network communications, and the authoring toolkit. The later enables the non-programmer user to create his own training scenarios and adapt them to his specific needs. Furthermore, there is an evaluation tool included that rates the trainee for his effectiveness. This system incorporates several state of the art programming and virtual reality features, along with high flexibility, availability and autonomy, comprising a valuable tool for managers.