Management training software system simulates disaster situations Dermot O'Sullivan, C&EN London

Ε xecutives of hazard-prone in­dustries must sometimes face the unthinkable—an explosion

at one of their company's production units, perhaps, or spillage of their product from a railcar, or an accident on an airport runway. Now a software disaster simulator coming on the mar­ket is aimed at helping executives and other managers plan for these unthink­able crises.

Called CriSys, the system was devel­oped by Crisis Management Associates of St. Albans, England, a collaboration between Psychometric Research & De­velopment (PRD) and European Vinyls Corp. (EVC). Capable of running on an MS-DOS desktop personal computer equipped with a speaker and printer, CriSys provides pictures on the moni­tor screen, simulated radio broadcasts and incoming telephone calls via the speaker, and printouts of simulated re­ports by news agencies and of newspa­per articles.

Scenarios are created in real time, and presented in great detail, in re­sponse to each action of the crisis man­agement team. And because the details vary from one presentation of a scenar­io to the next presentation, each pro­gram is reusable without losing its sur­prise impact or novelty. A press release generator, for instance, "reads" what is happening and constructs appropriate releases of differing length, using dif­ferent words each time the same pro­gram is run.

"CriSys exposes staff to crisis situa­tions specific to their own industry," observes psychologist Stephen F. Blinkhorn, chairman of PRD, a human factors consulting firm near London, where the system was developed. "It can be customized with specific users in mind, to whatever level of sophisti­cation is required, so giving them the opportunity of learning how to re­spond to unexpected events that could have a major impact on the public or on their organization's own activities." The program should be of value in helping companies develop or refine crisis management contingency plans and relate sensibly with the media.

"Our CriSys-based program is aimed at those who have to deal with the af­termath of an incident they can't con­trol," he says, "rather than addressing the management of the initial physical emergency. The likelihood of the sorts of accidents that CriSys simulates oc­curring in any year in any given com­pany is minuscule," he remarks en­couragingly. "But accidents do happen around the world. What we are doing is attempting to train managers by pro­viding them with a realistic scenario of what might happen in the case of a ma­jor corporate crisis."

CriSys emerged from work at EVC's Brussels headquarters. "We had a crisis management plan for about five years but decided we needed a training package to go with it," comments John G. Davies, EVC's group manager of ac­quisitions and corporate projects.

EVC, created in 1986 by pooling the vinyl chloride and polyvinyl chloride interests of Italy's EniChem and the U.K.'s ICI, is Europe's largest supplier of the materials. Overall annual vinyl chloride capacity totals 2.86 billion lb, and PVC capacity reaches 2.42 billion lb, at 10 plant sites in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the U.K. EVC also makes such down­stream items as § PVC film, foil, and | pipes in these coun- J tries as well as in $ Austria, Spain, and Sweden.

Blinkhorn and his associates had been working with EVC on other proj­ects in connection with PREKs services in recruitment and management de­velopment. Since its formation in 1985, PRD has been en­gaged in innova­tive work in such areas as the devel­opment of novel video-based re­cruitment screen­ing tests, and the design of valida­

tion methods for vocational qualifica­tions.

Stemming from this work was the creation of MISTRAL, an acronym for Multimedia Interactive Stack-based Rapid Learning language. This is a pro­prietary method for handling multime­dia developments—"multimedia in the sense of using multiple means of pre­senting information," Blinkhorn ex­plains. Used initially in an interactive video program for the assessment of managers, it has been extended to pro­vide a universal means for rapid devel­opment of multimedia program de­signs, he points out. PRD uses it to d e velop custom applications for clients.

Central to CriSys is Scirocco, the lan­guage used to construct the programs that make CriSys work. "Scirocco is a nonsense [term]," Blinkhorn acknowl­edges. "But since the language is an offshoot of MISTRAL, the name of a wind in southern France, we chose to call it Scirocco, after the hot wind blow­ing from North Africa.

"The precise means by which Scirocco story writer software works is a piece of discovery rather than an invention. We're not disclosing details of this. And it would be all but impossible for some­one to reverse-engineer what we have designed," he claims.

"Scirocco was designed originally as a means of turning complex numerical information into continuous prose," re-

Using the CriSys system (from left): Johnson, Blinkhorn, Davies

SEPTEMBER 21,1992 C&EN 21

SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY

Crisis exercise mimics vinyl chloride train derailment and fire disaster Programs for CriSys are supplied on floppy disks. One that is used to demonstrate the system presents a scenario involving a shipment of a large quantity of vinyl chloride in a railcar that has become derailed inside a tunnel, and has begun to leak. The leaked chemical ignites. Soon a raging fire develops, and a toxic cloud begins to drift toward a nearby town.

A location picture appears on the computer monitor screen accompanied by a TV newscaster's announcement of the event Shortly, a radio news­flash comes over the speaker. Using such emotive expressions as "devastat­ing accident" and "huge fire raging out of control" the on-the-spot report tells of road and rail links with the town having been cut, emergency and civil defense teams mobilized, and people readied for evacuation.

The broadcasts move on to the usual mixture of reports that make up the daily news, such as interna­tional and national political develop­ments and local happenings, which have no connection with the acci­dent. The programers who put Cri­Sys together refer to this material as "drivel." Its inclusion is important nonetheless because it lends a fur­ther element of realism to news of the main scenario event as it unfolds.

Then the sound of a phone ringing comes over the speaker, followed by the voice of a company representa­tive at the site explaining what ac­tions are being taken. This is fol­lowed by a printout of a press release that has been issued.

Soon, news agency and newspaper reports begin to come in. Some detail the nature and uses of vinyl chloride, of plastics in general, and of the haz­ardous nature of the chemical indus­try at large. Although written in such

a way that the information is credi­ble, the stories are laced with half-truths, inaccuracies, innuendos, dis­information, and misinformation.

Considerable prejudice against the industry has been built into the pro­gram. This helps train executives to be prepared for what people are like­ly to say, while at the same time it is designed to make them extremely an­gry, remarks Steve Blinkhorn of Psy­chometric Research & Development where the program is produced, with something approaching impish glee.

As the exercise progresses, the fre­quency of calls from the press, re­questing information from manage­ment as to its plans to respond to the emergency, steps up. "The questions arriving from the news media are ex­tremely blunt," notes Blinkhorn, who was largely responsible for de­veloping the program. "The point is to put pressure on the management team to face the issues without pre­varication." Meanwhile, as accident casualties mount, the management team must determine whether it is the company's product that is in­volved, what the product's potential hazards are, and what can be done to counteract or minimize them.

"We made a very deliberate deci­sion not to implement a computer game board," Blinkhorn explains. "The computer itself is not central in one of these exercises. It is on a table to one side, or might even be in an­other room. What takes place is a team working together."

The computer feeds into that pro­cess, Blinkhorn points out. Some of the time it is providing sound and pictures. Most of the time it is pro­ducing printed matter. An exercise may last three or four days, or it can be compressed into eight hours. It

also can be interrupted and suspend­ed as needed.

"CriSys programs provide manag­ers with a rehearsal for probably the most difficult thing they would ever have to face in their careers," Blink­horn says. Their involvement, he ex­plains, allows them to project them­selves more and more into what is be­ing presented, and to inject a level of credulity into the situation.

"An approach we recommend is to split management into groups be­cause the chance of a crisis incident occurring when the entire board membership is in the office is re­mote. Then those undertaking the ex­ercise have to decide how to delegate authority, how to locate those not present to get messages through to them, and so forth, " he continues.

Referring to the first CriSys exercise that took place recently at the Brussels headquarters of European Vinyls Corp., EVC's John Davies calls it "a very positive experience. People start­ed out thinking they were going to participate in some kind of computer game. But in no time at all they were absorbed by it. It became real. The challenge was something they had to rise to and respond to. One specific thing they soon realized was that peo­ple whose normal working responsi­bilities are at high levels of manage­ment also should know a great deal about day-to-day company operations, and such details as the nature of prod­ucts and intermediates."

Davies believes that such exercises should take place annually, particular­ly when there are changes in the man­agement team or when a new team comes into existence. And besides be­ing a valuable experience, the activity forces team members to strengthen their teamwork skills, he adds.

calls Charles E. Johnson, PRUs manag­ing director, who played a key role in Scirocco's development. "We then found it to be an effective method for generating source code for computer programs."

Johnson earned his doctorate from University College, London, in psycho-linguistics. "One of the things I was working on was generative semantics, how it is that with a fixed set of words and rules one can effectively produce an infinite variety of languages. A basic principal in generative semantics

sparked the idea for how we could cre­ate Scirocco," he continues.

Scirocco is an expanded and en­hanced version of the C computer lan­guage that accommodates free-form text and grammar rules. Hence, ordi­nary C code and Scirocco can be inter­mingled easily. A program is written in a mixture of C and the extensions the programers have added to it. The pro­gram is processed in "standard" C and compiled.

"The structure of an output docu­ment," Johnson says, "is defined in

terms of an arbitrary network of gram­mar rules, which can operate at various levels to define the overall shape of a document, and successive layers of de­tail down to the construction of indi­vidual sentences. The resultant execut­able programs are very compact and very fast. A typical agent in CriSys gen­erates a page of prose in less than a second, and it can produce endless variations as required."

"We are dealing with a complex, in­terlocking, arbitrary network of rules," Blinkhorn explains. "When you feed in

22 SEPTEMBER 21,1992 C&EN

something at the top, it filters down through the rules structure and pro­duces something that comes out at the other end which has the consistency that the rules demand. So if you're sloppy in programing the rules, you'll get rubbish out. The more effort you put into the programing, the tighter it will be and the more you can replicate a given style and produce something that's plausible.

"We would need at least three months to draw up programs similar to those we designed for EVC, which took us six months. Much of the time and effort involved was the research at the front-end. We drew on a lot of ex­pertise from emergency services, rail­road companies, and the like, in the broad formulation of the program. And I spent many hours going around EVC's vinyl chloride and PVC produc­tion sites observing all aspects of the operations and looking for things that could be made to go wrong. Toward the end, I could have given an hour-long lecture without notes on the man­ufacture, use, and physical characteris­tics of vinyl chloride and PVC, and of the raw materials and intermediates in­volved in their production."

EVC's Davies now plans to bring the crisis management exercises to the company's operating units around Eu­rope. Although the basic program will be the same, it will need some modifi­cations to reflect differing conditions, laws, and regulations in the individual countries, as well as place names, lan­guages, and so forth, to make the exer­cises more realistic and believable for those engaged in them.

To date, Scirocco has been modified to cope with languages that are written in Roman script. This embraces all the West European languages.

To be offered to a wider market, Cri-Sys would have to be tailored to the operations of specific companies. Alter­natively, an approach that would cost less for individual clients would be to select subject areas—polypropylene or synthetic rubber, for instance—which bear a similarity in broad outline from one producer to another. Such pro­grams would have to be undertaken on a commission basis for individual orga­nizations to reflect the fine details in structure that make them believable.

"CriSys has a number of obvious ap­plications," Blinkhorn points out. "Any company involved in the manufacture

or movement of dangerous goods, those that supply bulk fuels, or indeed any whose activities conceivably could lead to the kind of crises that have im­plications to public health and safety could put it to use." For example, pro­gram scenarios could be built for air­ports or airlines, or that would be ap­plicable to financial crises or product liability. Some could even be generated to train journalists how to ask ques­tions, respond to answers, and write their stories.

In putting a program together, Blinkhorn explains, points of vulnera­bility must be discovered, the structure of an organization must be identified, and then the software modules re­quired to model the crisis situation and the sorts of communications that would arise in a crisis must be selected.

Blinkhorn declines to put a price tag on CriSys. "What we have is a method rather than a product," he says. "Quot­ing a price presents a difficulty partly because we can program it to all levels

Direct conversion of coal to fuel oils and feedstocks remains a possible alternative to conventional crude oil. The economic pressure to develop coal conversion schemes may have lessened in recent years, but the basic need continues.

The Department of Energy has been funding research on direct conversion of coal for many years, albeit, at a re­duced rate recently. The prospects for such processing appear to have been slightly redirected toward use of the conventional refinery for production of finished products, following the initial conversion. Just how all of this fits to­gether was described by several ex­perts during a Division of Fuel Chem­istry symposium at the recent national meeting of the American Chemical So­ciety in Washington, D.C.

Peizheng Zhou, a research engineer for Burns & Roe Services Corp., says that, based on the characteristics of coal liquids, hydroprocessing is the most im­portant refining technology to use in up­grading coal liquids. In fact, the refining of coal liquids can be envisioned as an extension of the coal-to-liquid conver­sion process because coal liquefaction is, in fact, a hydrogénation process.

Current liquefaction practice is to re­cycle residuum from the coal conversion

of sophistication and add to it. The ba­sic software itself needn't be a very ex­pensive item. The price depends entire­ly on the amount of research entailed and the complexity of the systems called for." For instance, he explains, if the system were being programed for a company with a lot of different prod­ucts, and in which the same top man­agement had responsibility for a wide variety of business sectors, the opera­tion would entail a lot of research and a very detailed and complex program design.

"The value," Blinkhorn stresses, "is in the intellectual aspect of the soft­ware, the analysis that goes into it, and its design. The industry standard hard­ware, on the other hand, costs a mini­mum. It doesn't entail an expensive or complex setup, much of which usually calls for specially trained operators. There's a lot of very straightforward, simple computer technology. Its suc­cess largely has to do with the way it is put together." Π

to extinction to produce a total distillate product with a low boiling range (370 to 427 °C), explains Zhou. It may even be possible to lower the low end of the range to 350 °C. If so, this would be of great benefit in limiting the production of toxic aromatic materials, he continues.

Zhou believes it is realistic to consider refining coal liquids together with petro­leum in a conventional refinery rather than in a grass-roots refinery built strict­ly for the coal liquids themselves. The coal liquids may be introduced either as a single feed or as previously fractionat­ed cuts. More flexibility is achieved if the coal liquids are distilled in the liquefac­tion plant and the individual fractions introduced into the refinery, where there is maximum compatibility of properties.

Coal liquids are similar to naphtha fractions from naphthenic crude oil, Zhou explains. The main problems are low oxidation stability caused by the presence of oxygen heteroatoms and the lack of light ends. Coal naphtha, however, has a high octane content and low aromatics content. The clear octane ratings are in the range of 76 to 83 re­search octane number (RON).

Zhou says this naphtha is an excellent reformer feedstock to make gasoline components with a RON greater than

Coal conversion focuses on refineries

SEPTEMBER 21,1992 C&EN 23