SCI Homeland Security Applications

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IN HOMELAND SECURITY

MASA Announces TARANIS: Technologies for the Appraisal of Risks through Animation and Simulation

The TARANIS project, supported by MASA, ESRI-France and the LRI (Orsay University computer science laboratory), aims to create a new training system for crisis managers, based on innovative simulation tools, allowing trainers to recreate easily the most complex crisis situations.

Simulation tools offer unprecedented control to the trainer over the training session while making the virtual crisis reactive to the trainees actions and providing an unlimited variety of extreme crisis situations, a challenge that even very expensive ground exercises cannot meet. More on TARANIS on this page

See the ESRI Press release (in French)

Homeland Security Applications

Simulation belongs to the modern military environment, just like the Internet, C4I and weapon systems. For a long time, simulation has been merely used as a training tool, adapted to the basic training of soldiers or pilots who aim at mastering manual know-how. However, modern military operations are now evolving in such a way that an operational preparation system is no longer a luxury, but becomes a critical requirement. The same goes with homeland security and crisis management: recent headlines have tragically illustrated the diversity and complexity of crisis situations in urban environment. From the recent terrorist attack, in London or Mumbai, to the devastating tsunamis in South-East Asia, all these crisis situations have in common a large number of different actors, belonging to civilian population and various organizations, e.g., firemen, policemen, medical staff, military, NGO volunteers, etc. All these actors have been confronted to sudden and sometimes unpredictable events.

In such context, more than the behavior and security forces, the behavior of the population becomes critical and central in both the understanding and management of emergency operations. Human behavior reproduction and simulation therefore become cornerstones for emergency management.

To maintain optimal preparedness and readiness of high-level command posts, modern simulation systems are becoming more and more what could be defined as “decision trainers”, providing very realistic situation settings for all command levels and organizations. This is MASA-SCI’s expertise.

Our homeland security offering is aimed at operation centers, incident management teams and first responders, who want tools to train, assess and experiment.

Beyond providing training capabilities, MASA-SCI’s simulation technology can be used to validate inter-agency emergency and crisis management plans, and/or drill a specific structure (fire rescue services, energy providers, water distribution, health services) while simulating the others.

While more and more crisis management structures become equipped with digitized information management systems, MASA-SCI’s simulation-based solutions provide a way to train, rehearse on experiment on the real terrain of operations.