Simfor: towards a Collaborative Software Platform for Urban Crisis Management

Risk and crisis management has become an important topic for public and private organizations. Nowadays, an important problem concerns the management of disasters (flooding, fire, nuclear explosion ...) in urban environments. To face such events, different actors like firefighters, mayors, or policemen have typically to deal with a wide amount of data, each at different decision levels. Aggregating various data from various sources to prepare the scenario is then crucial in order to create a credible realistic environment. The project SIMFOR has been initiated to develop a "serious game" oriented towards risk and crisis management in a complex urban context. This game will provide a 3D multi-actor training platform, which will help the players to improve both the prevention and the reaction to critical situations. Several actors can be managed by AI based on multi-agent. Phenomena like fire propagation or transportation net can be simulated by physical models. The first part of this communication will be devoted to the problematic of risk and crisis management. It notably situates the potentiality of "serious gaming" in such problem, which involves to aggregate data in an interoperable way using ISO standards. Part two concerns the SIMFOR serious game prototype. It presents the software architecture and a game session concerning a car fire scenario.