Creating Emergency Management Training Simulations through Ontologies Integration

Training simulations, which involve the collaboration of multiple users (represented as avatars), sharing a common virtual environment, are difficult to build, control and manage. This paper describes an architecture to support non-programmer emergency management trainers to rapidly create different instances of powerful and complex training simulations. The novel aspects of this architecture, that makes it different from other related systems, are the innovative techniques and concepts that are used. Events collected from sensor networks deployed on physical environments subject to emergency situations can be added to the simulation scenarios being created. A set of ontologies was devised to create powerful training simulation instances, such as different fire classes, different fire fighting techniques, specific rescue tactics, etc. A case study was implemented to validate the architecture. The results show that this system can be a powerful tool for the creation of complex training simulations.