Using Serious Gaming to Simulate Disaster Recovery for a Major Telco

Blurring the line between gaming and business one simulation at a time

Serious Gaming? What?

If you are already familiar with this powerful emerging technology, go ahead and skip this intro. For the uninitiated, this might be a good time to buckle your seatbelt.

Serious Gaming uses game technology and methodologies to solve real-world problems for businesses, governments, and everyone in between. This approach combines the immersive and interactive aspects of gaming with practical applications in various industries. The potential impact cannot be understated.

Sectors such as healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, and emergency response will never be the same, as leaders can now run endless simulations to inform and enhance their decision-making in the real world.

That’s Nice, But How Does Serious Gaming Actually Work?

Every company has vast amounts of data — the real challenge is putting it all together.

With Serious Gaming, the data your company already has (Digital Twins, CAD models, operational data, asset data, IoT and sensor data, etc.) can be combined with publicly available information (geospatial data, regulatory data, census data, etc.) and put inside a game engine to create simulated real-world scenarios.

This shift is not only technological in nature — it’s also a shift in thinking about how we do business. By thinking of a business outcome as ‘winning’ in the ‘game’, we can assign points to various aspects of the simulation and figure out the most efficient path toward victory.

In May of 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov to become the first machine to unseat a reigning world champion. Since then, AI has only gotten better at winning our games. By setting the right game conditions in a simulation, we can use Deep Blue’s great, great, great, great grandchildren to solve ever-more complex problems and reveal highly accurate solutions we never knew were possible.

This article brings the above concept to life by detailing how this astonishing new technology could help a leading telco plan for disaster response.

You Can’t Start Playing Until You Have a Game

A major telco had a very straightforward question: how can we get our network back up and running as efficiently as possible if a major storm hits the West Coast? We created a PoC to answer that.

In order to start answering this question, we needed a virtual world that simulated all relevant variables. As you might have guessed, there isn’t a Triple-A title called “Cell Tower Tsunami” that all the kids are playing these days — so we had to make one.

Creating a Detailed Game Map

Starting with a game map gives our players a simulated world to play in. The world needed to draw as much relevant data as possible and combine it within a powerful game engine.

Setting the Game Pieces

Now that we had a map to play on, the game needed variables, non-player characters (NPCs), and a system of points to indicate and reach winning conditions.

Time to Play

Within less than a month, the team had built a fully functional, three-dimensional, physics-accurate world. For a mere mortal, this set of variables would have been far too much to balance all at once, but for well-trained AI, it was just another game to master. Show AI what winning looks like, and it’ll get you there in ways you never dreamed of.

The Exadel team continuously ran the simulation, experimenting with how the AI could effectively manage emergency response. The PoC demonstrated real-time tracking, repair, mobile towers, simulated human crews, and an optimized response plan.

As if the above-mentioned variables weren’t complicated enough, it also took into account exactly what audience was near what tower and weighted response planning accordingly. For example, those helping with the overall disaster response, like fire stations, would need to have access as quickly as possible. Downed trees, flooding, blocked roads, and other real-time changes to the map would require unique, on-the-fly actions and decisions.

Getting a New High Score

The PoC allows human operators to interact with AI recommendations, approve or modify plans, and execute them in real-time. This collaborative environment balances the best of AI precision and data synthesis with human intuition to achieve the highest operational efficiency imaginable.

In the simulation, the team was able to restore a severely damaged network to full operational capacity in just over two hours. Better yet, the system can be used in real-time in an actual emergency to gain deep insights from AI about how to best address disasters as they unfold. People are always hesitant to trust AI, which is exactly why these simulations provide the perfect environment to hone the algorithm until it can be relied upon out in the real world. That said, let’s not forget that we’re not exactly infallible.

We humans have made many mistakes in disaster response; we all remember the enormous human error factor after Hurricane Katrina. This application of Serious Gaming can quite literally help us save lives.

But things don’t always need to be so dramatic.

What About Your Game?

Bad weather and cell towers are just one expression of this promising new technology. The key here is not the example but the approach.

Chances are you’re already sitting on a treasure trove of data about your logistics system, your factory, your financial platform, or your solar power plant. All that data is just begging to be gamified and optimized into your end goal: increased efficiency, cost savings, or even profit increases — whatever you define as victory.

With Serious Gaming, any business can be turned into a game, and any game can be won.