About

The project aims at developing a holistic Naval Fire Fighting Training and Education System (NAFTES) to complement existing training infrastructure available in a special Unit of the HMOD (Hellenic Navy, Naval Training Command – NTC). The discussed training facilities are the Fire Fighting Simulator (FFS) and the Crew Evacuation Simulator (CES) both installed and operated in the Damage Control School (DCS) of the NTC (Naval Fortress of Skaramagkas). The FFS has been in operation since 2006, constructed/deployed by Process Combustion Co (UK) and contains representative ship engineering compartments structured in different layers/floors. NAFTES will come as a vital addition this training facility, structured in three different facets that will “wrap” the two training components of DCS (i.e., FFS, CES).

The different facets of the proposed training program are the following:

• Introductory Training (IT)
• Theoretical (classroom)
• Training (THT)
• Hands-On Training (HOT)

IT will be materialized through a properly structured and populated tele-training platform (TT) based on an advanced Learning Management System (LMS), which will allow crews and assigned officers to become acquainted with the fire training fundamentals and the particulars of the DCS components. Such introductory training, when implemented through the TT platform, will allow the DCS training capacity to be highly increased while meeting the challenges and needs of modern maritime businesses. Trainees with a very busy professional schedule will be able to undertake the IT in their premises ashore or in their ships while stationed at remote harbors. Tele-training is structured around a certain multidisciplinary curricula involving engineering, medical and psychology aspects that may affect the learning curve of trainees. Courses will be made available to trainees of different audiences in a media-rich form.

The THT will be performed in the DCS premises by highly skilled instructors and will be supplemented by multimedia material (videos, animations), which is to be integrated in the LMS, retrieved and presented during classroom hours. The HOT pillar will be materialized through an advanced portable system, which will be carried by trainees during their presence in the simulated (and fire impacted) engineering room. The system will come in the form of Augmented Reality (AR) applications, which will overlay warnings or explanatory text to their viewport of the training “stage”. Such applications will be executed in optical head-mounted displays (google glasses, helmets), which will retrieve material from the LMS. A very important feature of such devices is their indoor localization capability. This is to be exploited by HOT in order to deliver a full image of the training “stage” to the DCS instructor (e.g., show the exact positions of all trainees).

NAFTES relies on three very important technical components tightly coupled to deliver a rounded whole. Such components are the LMS (open and extensible to meet the needs of modern training programmes), the AR applications (installed and operated in crew carried, fully networked devices) and the context awareness mechanism that capture the location of the trainee. Therefore, NAFTES will provide the technological means of radically improving the training processes currently followed in DCS. The AR component will allow trainees to be engaged in complicated drills/scenarios. Trainees will be guided throughout the complex engineering structure to precisely execute fire-fighting and/or evacuation drills. More elaborate versions of the AR component will be provided to the leaders of the trainee groups or instructors in order to provide an immediate overview of the training context (the drill progress, the spatial distribution of the trainees, etc.) as well as the current status of the fire-fighting effort.

NAFTES will be complemented by a post-training online assessment module which will be appended to the IT-THT-HOT workflow. This will allow the assessment/grading of the performance of DCS trainees following the entire cycle of the course, or parts of it. The target groups of the project include Commercial/military ship crews and, with proper adjustment, virtually personnel of any kind of engineering premises prompt to the risk of fire. The ubiquity of the design allows a large number of engineering/industrial applications through the emulation of any working environment. Provided that in modern commercial ships crews are often of mixed nationalities, it is imperative that NAFTES is carried out transnationally with emphasis on the IT and THT phases to ensure proper cooperation and coordination of crew members to effectively face a fire situation. The portability of the AR equipment will ensure that the HOT training phase is flexible enough to be carried out in a variety of premises to include future engineering compartment designs and not be limited to existing ones.