Disasters Management: a serious game architecture centered on a Modeling and Simulation infrastructure

Disaster Management is gaining increasing importance owing to the continuous growth of social and economic impacts related to natural and manmade disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, terrorist acts, human errors etc.). Within this context, the paper proposes a new architecture for the development and execution of serious-games addressed to the staff involved in disaster management (in particular to those who hold leadership roles). Specifically, the proposed architecture (SG-MSA) is based on a Modeling and Simulation Infrastructure (MSI) that includes Software Agents for supporting the evolution of the game over the time. Furthermore, to recreate with satisfactory accuracy all the conditions in which the actors involved in disaster management usually work, the architecture is completed by four additional components: the Disaster Management Platform (DGP), the Players Management Platform (PMP), the Virtual Scenario Management Platform (VSGP) and the Information Management Platform (IMP). In this paper an overview of the whole architecture is presented with particular focus on the role of the MSI and the Agents layer.