Crisis management training framework supported by virtual reality and artificial intelligence

• Crisis exercises need to be more credible, efficient and effective • The EGCERSIS training framework covers exercise design and conduct. • The EGCERSIS framework is dedicated to trainers to train on-site practitioners as well as decision-makers Emergency management training exercises, though indispensable, often suffer from a lack of realism. Their implementation is time and money consuming and require a lot of resources (human and material). Because of the complexity involved in creating challenging scenarios, exercises are often limited in terms of efficiency and information retention rate. To address these issues, the EGCERSIS research project (pronounced “exercise”) aims to leverage the potential of virtual reality (VR) to design a realistic and modular training framework, allowing crisis management professionals (actors and decision-makers) to train in configurable, dynamic, and interactive environments. Following an incremental approach built around three crisis scenarios and extended over four years, the environment proposed by EGCERSIS is structured around four modules in interaction with each other: (i) a VR environment in which actors deal with the crisis, (ii) the game master virtual space to configure the crisis before and during the training, (iii) a virtual crisis cell where decision-makers supervise operations through a common operational visual representation and a decision support system, and (iv) interactive dashboards in which trainers evaluate the training and the trainees’ performances. The structure, benefits, and potentials of this framework are presented and discussed.