Emergency preparedness in industrial plants: A forward-looking solution based on industry 4.0 enabling technologies

Abstract The need for effective response systems is widely acknowledged from industry managers as well as from academic communities that have invested a great deal of time and effort to detect methodologies and approaches to enhance response systems performances. With this in mind, the proposed research work recognizes the crucial role of training activities in implementing high performing response systems in industrial sites and takes a step forward proposing an Industry 4.0-driven solution for emergency staff training. The proposed solution seamlessly combines a teaching strategy defined as Cooperative, Experiential and Differentiated Learning along with industry 4.0 enabling technologies and approaches such as simulation, virtual reality, immersive and interactive technologies. This way, leveraging on the user experience and on the capabilities to provide a comprehensive as well as realistic set of training scenarios, the proposed training system has been critically investigated to ascertain: • How the performances of Emergency Managers and Emergency Team Members evolve along training sessions. • To which extent the proposed solution is effective in delivering procedural knowledge to Emergency Managers and Emergency Team Members; • Whether it is realistic enough to produce psychological stress in those people that are trained with it. After an experimental campaign, data have been collected and statistically analyzed to answer to the research questions stated above based on scientific evidence.