The Taranis Project

The TARANIS ANR project aims at creating an innovative training system for crisis managers allowing trainers to easily recreate complex crisis situations.

    

The goal of the Aviz team in this project was to design graphical user interfaces and visualization tools for improving the quality of crisis training exercices. We have been working closely with MASA Group and members of the CODAH (Communauté de l'agglomération havraise), who are regularly organizing crisis management exercices to train people who might get involved in a civil crisis in the city of Le Havre.

We conducted observational studies and participatory design sessions in Le Havre, which suggested that the quality of the training exercices can be significantly improved by 1) increasing group activity awareness during the exercise and 2) adding logging mechanisms to enhance feedback to the trainees during the final debriefing session.

With these two goals in mind, we designed and implemented an augmented crisis animation setup in order to assist the animators in their tasks without significantly changing their working habits. This setup includes:

• A collaborative interactive timeline visualization, which allows animators to see the evolution of the scenario in real-time, assign tasks and change their status, and add annotations they can reuse during their debriefing session. This timeline relies on a client-server architecture that has been developed together with MASA, and supports multiple displays and multiple sources of input. The GUI design of the timeline has been inspired by the experimental air traffic control tools Digistrips and Maestro D-MAN developed between 2000 and 2003 by CENA (now LII), IntuiLab, and Intactile Design.
• A phone conversation and video logging mechanism, which records all communications occurring between the animation room and the crisis room, and allows the animators to replay and comment on conversations during the debriefing session, as well as to reflect on how to improve the crisis scenario across sessions.
• Simulation and GIS tools, developed by MASA and ESRI-France.

The augmented crisis animation room has been tested in real settings (day-long crisis training exercises) and iterated over three times.

Video

• A video summary made by MASA presenting the Taranis project and what has been done (AVI 80MB). Low-res version here (AVI 4MB).

Other material

• The slides of the final ANR meeting describing Aviz's contributions (PDF 2MB, ppt here).
• The slides of the mid-term ANR meeting describing Aviz's contributions (PDF 2MB, ppt here).
• A short video of an early version of the timeline showing the animated layout mechanism (avi 6MB).
• A video tutorial made for the animators of the crisis exercise, describing the installation of the 3rd iteration, including how to use the phones and advanced timeline features (30 min streaming).
• An executable demo of the timeline for Windows (exe 3MB).
• The list of interview questions here (PDF 15KB, doc here). The transcripts are kept confidental in order to respect the interviewees' privacy.
• The slides introducing the initial participatory design session (PDF 2MB, ppt here).
• A video showing some of the outcomes of the participatory design session (avi 45MB). Full videos here: Team 1, Team 2, Team 3, Team 4.

Links

• A page by Julie Stromer describing the Taranis project.
• A page from INRIA describing the Taranis project.
• A page from MASA describing the Taranis project.

Contact

At Aviz:

• Pierre Dragicevic -- Main correspondent
• Jean-Daniel Fekete -- Secondary correspondent
• Julie Stromer -- Research engineer
• Johan Euphrosine -- Research engineer

At MASA Group:

• Jérôme Comptdaer -- Main correspondent

At CODAH:

• Patrick Lions -- Main correspondent