CBRNE Accident Coordination Training (CBRNE-ACT) System – technical description

The use of computer simulation and virtual environments allow for cost-effective education, training, and exercises. The training audience can be exposed to scenarios that are inaccessible or too dangerous, too complex, or too expensive to recreate in a live environment. The use of virtual training environments is therefore widespread within the defence community. CBRNE (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosive) incidents pose many of the same challenges as mentioned above, making virtual environments a useful tool for both CBRNE incident training and education. This document describes the CBRNE Accident Coordination Training demonstrator (CBRNE-ACT) that has been developed by the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI). It also describes the user needs and requirements, design, and implementation of CBRNE-ACT. FFI has previously developed a demonstrator to show possibilities for training on response and management of CBRNE incidents. This demonstrator uses NATO and civilian standards and consists of military commercial off-the-shelf computer-generated forces and simulation components to include dispersion of a toxic gas and its effect on personnel. The goals of the Norwegian contribution to the CBRNE project were to adapt and further develop the FFI CBRNE demonstrator for a specific training scenario, to import high-fidelity dispersion data, and to perform an experiment with (end) users. Our work has been performed in cooperation with the Norwegian Civil Defence and supporting the civil defence course Interaction at a contaminated incident site CBRN/E. This is a tactical management course that introduces the challenges associated with handling a CBRNE incident. The course gives a comprehensive and up-to-date competence in handling such an incident. The interaction between the actors involved may be enhanced through joint training of emergency personnel who will be involved when such an incident occurs. It is essential that the course provides the necessary skillset to carry out operational and tactical assessments and to interact with other agencies and organizations. FFI has used a standard process for the development of distributed simulation system when developing CBRNE-ACT – the Distributed Simulation Engineering and Execution Process (DSEEP). This document outline is in accordance with the DSEEP steps. CBRNE-ACT is a component-based system where the components communicate using international and NATO standards. This allows for easy extension of the system and reuse of components. The use of the distributed simulation standard High-Level Architecture (HLA) also enables connecting CBRNE-ACT to other (military) training systems.