Högskolan i Skövde

One of the main criteria of effectively managing emergency and crisis situations is good preparedness. Simulation and serious games (SSG) are often advocated as promising technologies supporting training and increasing the skills necessary to deal with new, complex and often unexpected situations. This paper is based on an investigation of why a seemingly appropriate SSG technology was not used long after procurement. We identified potential obstacles and challenges of SSG implementation in organizations responsible for societal safety. The focus is on fire fighter training and is based on 33 interviews with major stakeholders from seven countries, from organizations with successful as well as unsuccessful experiences of SSG use. By contrasting the different incentives and views regarding the technology use, this paper contributes to a better understanding of challenges related to SSG implementation and use. The results confirm the possible benefits of SSGs, but also highlight an urgent need for new approaches to integrate these new technologies into organizational practices. Only by formulating local, organizational strategies with the SSG use can the technology be implemented successfully

A trend over the past years is that simulation systems for training are being connected in simulation networks, allowing the interaction of teams spread in distributed sites. By combining interconnected simulation systems the simulation complexity increases and may affect time-critical simulation tasks in a negative way. As a consequence, the training simulation objectives may not be met. The same problem may occur when performing, for example, mission rehearsal on site, since available computation resources are usually very limited in this scenario, or for a joint fires scenario, where the large and complex functional chain (including intelligence, C2, forward observer, pilots, etc.) may overload existing resources. In this work, the technique of imprecise computation in real-time systems (ICRS) to preserve time-critical simulation tasks is presented. The ICRS technique allows time-critical tasks to produce quicker solutions for approximate results and saves computational resources. This paper discusses the main advantages of theICRS technique by a review of the commonly used optimization concepts built upon imprecise computation field. Thepaper ends with presenting a work-in-progress: an architectural solution for aligning ICRS with the High Level Architecture (HLA), standardized as the IEEE 1516-series.

This study presents the Thesis Steering Model (TSM), an instrument supporting systematic communication and collaboration between the different stakeholders involved in industrial doctoral projects. The results describe TSM and illustrate its introduction for seven doctoral projects within a postgraduate school in applied informatics. The experiences from the first two years in use are: enhanced communication, mutual understanding of academic and business values, and opportunity to the doctoral students to build a research identity associated to their own project.

Industrial doctoral projects are one possible way to promote knowledge transfer between universities and commercial organizations. These projects are anchored and initiated in problems identified by business organizations, further discussed and refined by researchers from related research areas and last approximately four-five years. Although, there are a number of benefits of such interdisciplinary projects, there are also associated challenges. The challenges often relate to differences in cultures, interests and goals of the involved parties. The hypothesis behind our study is that systematic communication on business values and academic requirements within the specific doctoral projects considerably increases the probability of success of the projects by producing academic and industrial values as well as saves time.

This paper presents the Thesis Steering Model (TSM), an instrument developed to support systematic communication and collaboration for the different stakeholders involved in industrial doctoral projects. The development of TSM is based on project management tools used by organizations, and on national requirements for postgraduate education. TSM emphasizes the early stages of a project. The paper includes basic motivations and issues in developing the TSM, as well as its use in the view of academic literature in the subject. The results illustrate the use of TSM for seven doctoral projects within a postgraduate school in applied informatics. The experiences from the first two years in use are that benefits occur in terms of enhanced communication, mutual understanding and building long-term relations between industry and academy and giving more opportunity to the doctoral students to build a research identity associated to their own project. Additionally, we discuss the need and role of structured communication for resource handling and necessary intercultural collaboration activities needed during industrial doctoral projects.

In this work, we raise three critical questions that must be investigated to ameliorate composability ofvirtual simulation models and to enable adoption of systematic and stringent real-time techniques toenable more scalable simulation models for virtual and constructive simulation. The real-time techniquesin question enable us to separate between policies and mechanisms and, thus, the simulation engine candecide dynamically how to run the simulation given the existing resources (e.g., processor) and the goalsof the simulation (e.g., sufficient fidelity in terms of timing and accuracy). The three critical questionsare: (i) how to design efficient and effective algorithms for making dynamic simulation model designdecisions during simulation; (ii) how to map simulation entities (e.g., agents) into (real-time) tasks; and(iii) how to enable a divide and conquer approach to validating simulation models.

Training actors from public safety agencies (PSA), e.g. emergency medical services, fire departments, police departments involves different technologies and communication and collaboration activities. New technologies promise better support, not only for training, but also for logging relevant information for future analysis and learning. However, choosing the right technologies, defining proper set-ups for the training activities, and identifying premises for long-term use of technical facilities is both difficult and time consuming. Applying earlier lessons from evaluating work in Virtual Environments (VEs) [1], our aim is to develop a better understanding of the impact of new technologies by identifying collaboration patterns influencing training. Collaboration is examined via social, technical, and task related interaction, distinguishable in the different phases of training, from starting an alarm to ending the emergency activities. Our main results illustrate the benefits of (1) building scenarios, and training whole activity chains for certain rescue or other emergency activities, (2) using simulations for better understanding physical places, the task, and (3) distinguishing technical, social and task focused characteristics for factors influencing emergency focused collaboration. Moreover, the results also contribute to understanding the benefits of considering specific simulation technologies when training for emergency and rescue activities.