Enhancing Situational Awareness in Integrated Planning Tasks Using a Microgaming Approach: Steinkjer, Norway 8-9 October 2015

A lot of working environments today are very complex, and tasks are interdependent. This requires well-trained and skilled personnel. One example of such complex, interdependent system is a container terminal. A container terminal represents an important node in the multimodal transportation of goods. It connects the global sea transportation of goods with the more regional hinterland transportation, including the storage of goods within the terminal. In such a node, many operations have to be planned in order to ensure a high performance of the whole system. Planners of these operations need a good understanding of the situation, described as Situational Awareness (SA). To develop situational awareness, training activities that fit in the work processes, and relate closely to reality, are needed. In our paper, we introduce the concept of microgames as an approach to foster situational awareness and situated learning of integrated planning tasks within container terminals. The microgame used in this study is known as Yard Crane Scheduler (YCS), which was developed by a novel design approach known as game-storm, grounded in the triadic game design philosophy. Our experimental setup includes YCS game play, a survey to measure SA, a survey to collect demographics and a post-game evaluation survey. The sessions include briefing and debriefing lectures. Test sessions were conducted with 142 participants consisting of game design students, supply chain and transportation students from Netherlands, Germany and the United States. Based on these sessions, we were able to evaluate the role of situation awareness in integrated planning activities, and the playability and usefulness of the microgame. In conclusion, based on our quantitative analysis conducted on the data from the test sessions we can state that SA is very conducive to integrated planning tasks in container terminal operations. Our qualitative results reflect that the microgame allows for an enjoyable game activity, while providing a meaningful situated learning experience.