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
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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
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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
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