As fire and other emergencies become more complex, chaotic and concurrent, incident managers may find that traditional pre-season tabletop exercises struggle to cope with these new demands.
An emerging Australian company has seized the power of AI to develop a scenario package that moves faster, adapts to sudden changes, reacts to multiple pressures, and responds to decisions in real time, for better or for worse. Capital Shield’s Foresight platform is pitched as the next level full-dress rehearsal for wildfire and other emergency agencies.
The story starts back in 2020, when a group of undergraduates at the National Security College at the Australian National University established the Australian Crisis Simulation Summit. They brought together around 100 students from across Australia with Australian Government support to focus on realistic national security scenarios using a range of software platforms built for such exercises.
Tim Hobbs, CEO of Capital Shield, says the problem was that none of the platforms did what was actually needed. “They couldn’t generate a genuinely realistic exercise environment. We could build a compelling scenario on paper, but the tools couldn’t bring it to life.”
And so, Hobbs and his co-founder, Connor Kneebone, built a new software platform, using AI to lift the standard to include more complex, more dynamic scenarios, that can twist and turn in real time.
“It’s a browser-based environment built around doctrine that recreates the pressure of a real incident, with live spatial mapping, radio traffic, media calls, social media sentiment and stakeholder pressure all arriving at once, against a compressed operational clock,” he said.
“An agency can build a scenario in its own geography, with its own fuel loads, fire weather and community assets, then run its IMT through it. Because the environment is adaptive, the fire responds to the team’s decisions.”
Capital Shield has established relationships in the Defence and national security space with several Australian Government agencies using the platform, which links to the Australasian Inter-service Incident Management System (AIIMS), or as needed, to a state emergency plan, or to an organisation’s own crisis management plan or competency standards.
Capital Shield was an exhibitor at the IAWF Fire Behaviour and Fuels conference in Hobart in April this year and attracted strong interest demonstrating Foresight.
Foresight is also aimed at international use with take-up by agencies in Germany and Japan, and early approaches being made in the US and Canada.
The exercise can be delivered by one facilitator in person or remotely, with participants in different places able to share the same simulation for fire, flood, storm or other events.
Hobbs says the platform offers a better option to static and scripted exercises in current use worldwide. “They are often PowerPoint-based, with a facilitator reading injects off a list and giving a subjective debrief at the end. Everyone agrees it’s a great way to learn, and it is. But the pressure isn’t real, the realism isn’t there, and performance isn’t measured.
“We’ve taken exercises to the next level. In Foresight you’re making the decisions you’d be expected to make on the day of a real incident, in a live, reactive environment, but a safe one. The fire responds to your suppression strategy, the media and the community push back through the same channels you’d really use, and the clock doesn’t wait.
“Then at the end it recalls all of it and gives you a structured after-action review: here’s how you went, here’s where the gaps were, measured against the doctrine your organisation actually operates under. So, it’s not just a better way to rehearse, it’s the first time most teams can demonstrate their readiness rather than assert it.”
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