Citation

Bouter VW, Beroggi GEG, van Gent D. Safety Sci. 2001; 39(1-2): 39-49.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2001, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The port of Rotterdam is one of the largest cargo and container ports in the world with a hazard area of over 600 km2 that affects about one million people. The port authority's emergency management training center is responsible for the training of more than 5000 field and command personnel, pertaining to five units: fire brigades, police, ambulance services, chemical advise, and port authority. Special consideration is given to the training of the Command Incident Place (CIP), which consists of the commanders of these five units, plus a press officer and a fire brigade officer as commander of the whole group. The CIP members must make joint decisions on how to respond to large and complex emergencies. A typical training session involves more than 20 trainers for only seven trainees, where scenario descriptions and communication are done by conventional means such as fax machines and telephones. The port authority's goal is to capitalize on advanced information and communication technologies to reduce human and material resources for such training sessions. To achieve this we have developed a training-based evolutionary multimedia prototyping methodology. We present this methodology, along with a description of the four multimedia systems that we developed and their empirical evaluation in real training sessions. The results of our study have been used to provide the port of Rotterdam with practical guidelines regarding how to proceed with designing more efficient training sessions. The most important finding was that an integrated system performs best for the trainees and that this goal should not be compromised by technological considerations. The paper ends with an overview of how to further expand the system and cross-cultural considerations to generalize the system for other ports.