This was part of a small group of projects aimed at police and fire fighters
using simulation but also considering learning styles. The cost of a major
fire in terms of property and content damage averaged (in 1993) £10,000 per
minute. A saving of only one minute on every major fire in the UK would
give a financial saving of £80 million each year.
The project team
believed that it was possible to educate a fire officer to deal
intelligently with the command and control of a major fire event he will
never have experienced. It involved the development of an intelligent
simulation based upon computer managed interactive media. The expertise and
content underpinning this educational development was provided by the West
Midlands Fire Service. Their brief for this training programme was
unambiguous and to the point:-
1.
Do not present the trainee with a model answer, because there are no generic
fires. Each incident is novel, complex, and often `wicked' in that it
changes obstructively as it progresses. Thus firefighting demands that
Commanders impose their individual intelligence on each problem to solve it.
2. A
suitable Educational Simulator should stand alone; operate in real time;
emulate as nearly as possible the `feel' of the fireground; present
realistic fire progress; incorporate the vast majority of those resources
normally present at a real incident; bombard the trainee with information
from those sources; provide as few system-prompts as possible.
3.
There should also be an interrogable visual debrief which can be used after
the exercise to give the trainees a firm understanding of the effects of
their actions. This allows them to draw their own conclusions of their
command effectiveness. Additionally, such a record of command and control
will be an ideal initiator of tutorial discussion.
4.
The simulation should be realisable on a hardware/software platform of
£10,000.
5.
The overriding importance is that the simulation should "emulate as nearly
as possible the feelings and stresses of the command role".
Iccarus (Intelligent
Command and Control: Acquisition and Review Using Simulation) uses
techniques drawn from artificial intelligence. The interactive simulation
allows for senior fire officers to practice the command and control of large
fire incidents as a restricted but genuine experience of real time crisis
decision making. Through a sophisticated iconic interface the commander /
learner can formulate decisions, send messages, deploy men, ask for
appliances, talk to persons involved and then experience the consequences of
his / her actions. A record of the commander / learner's actions is created
in parallel with the development of the fire and the events in the
simulation to allow a debrief to be analysed at the end of the simulation.
The simulation will never run the same way twice thus a learner can repeat
the experience with benefit.
