CRISIS is a 42-month project to research and develop an advanced critical incident management, interactive simulation environment for training security and emergency personnel in airport operational security. The prototype to be delivered will be distributed, scalable, collaborative interactive simulation environment that will enable training of crisis managers and their staff at airports, at different levels of the organization.

The prototype system will avoid the simulation paradigm where the trainee selects one of a number of pre-set drill-oriented choices at a predictable decision point. Instead, using an interactive games paradigm, the trainees will be able to practice situation and cue assessment, problem diagnosis, decision making and action coordination, in real-time in response to a critical incident. Currently, one key problem hindering the maintenance of a high level of preparedness in operational security organizations at airports is the long 2-year wait between major exercises.

In CRISIS, we will enable organizations and individuals to train-on-demand, and as frequently as needed due to the innovations, such as end-user re-configurability of training scenarios. This will allow staff to train individually 'playing' against the system, as a team within an organization, across organizations, and at different levels of the command hierarchy. CRISIS will adopt a 3-stage development strategy, integrating, testing and iteratively evaluating user performance at each step of the way.

The CRISIS consortium brings together a powerful combination of expertise in User modeling and requirements engineering, Games and simulation, Software engineering, distributed systems, and security, Decision sciences and technology, User performance evaluation, to deliver capability for training and improving operational security preparedness at airports.