Challenge Winners
CAPTRS is pleased to announce the winners of the global 2025 CAPTRS Challenge: AI-Powered Human Augmentation for Emergency & Crisis Games and Exercises. Organized in partnership with the University of L'Aquila and the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University, this challenge focused on advancing how emergency exercises are designed and delivered through AI-enabled augmentation. We received strong submissions from across the world and are excited to highlight the winning solutions.
Challenge Overview
The 2025 CAPTRS Challenge explored how emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, can enhance human performance in the design and execution of emergency and crisis exercises. Participants were tasked with developing solutions that:
- Support the full lifecycle of exercise design, from planning to evaluation
- Improve accessibility for organizations with limited in-house expertise
- Enable more dynamic, adaptive, and data-informed simulations
- Strengthen decision-making and coordination during crisis scenarios
Why This Matters
Emergency exercises are one of the most effective tools for preparedness, but they are often resource-intensive and inconsistent in quality. This challenge demonstrates how AI and related technologies can:
- Reduce the time and effort required to design exercises
- Increase realism and adaptability in scenarios
- Provide structured outputs that support learning and evaluation
- Enable more organizations to run effective exercises at scale
First Place: ArcManifold: A Neurosymbolic AI Platform for Crisis Simulation & Operational Readiness
Eric Ezenwanne | United States
ArcManifold reframes emergency exercises as a continuous, data-driven system. Using a neurosymbolic multi-agent approach, it dynamically simulates crisis scenarios, stress-tests organizational resilience, and generates key exercise outputs, from SITMANs to After Action Reports. The platform enables scalable, adaptive training for organizations of any size.
Second Place: SmartEx — Emergency Exercise Assistant Platform
Roberto Pizzi | Italy
SmartEx is an AI-assisted platform designed to support emergency management professionals across the full exercise lifecycle. It combines agentic AI and large language models to assist with analysis, structure, content creation, and materials, augmenting human decision-making rather than replacing it.
Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2025 CAPTRS Challenge, and to our partners at the University of L'Aquila and the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University.
