Serious Games for Improving Situational Awareness in Container Terminals

Abstract

Container terminals decouple the long-distance, high volume deep-sea transport from the short-distance, highly fragmented hinterland transport. As around 65 % of general cargo is shipped in containers, these terminals play a very important role in global trade. Planning and aligning the activities in and around container terminals is quite difficult, even more because of frequent disturbances in the seaside and the landside operations within the transportation network. The theory of Situational Awareness (SA) might help to improve the alignment between planning activities and to increase resilience. SA asks, however, for a different way of working and communicating. Awareness and practice sessions are needed to train managers and planners to use the SA concepts. The Dinalog project SALOMO has developed tools and serious games to serve as a training, learning, and “try-out” tool for students and practitioners to gain experience in Situational Awareness, alignment of planning activities, and in dealing with disturbances in and around container terminals. This chapter discusses the Situational Awareness framework, on which the tools and games have been built, as well as first experiences in using these tools and games.