Emergency Navigation without an Infrastructure

Abstract

Emergency navigation systems for buildings and other built environments, such as sport arenas or shopping centres, typically rely on simple sensor networks to detect emergencies and, then, provide automatic signs to direct the evacuees. The major drawbacks of such static wireless sensor network (WSN)-based emergency navigation systems are the very limited computing capacity, which makes adaptivity very difficult, and the restricted battery power, due to the low cost of sensor nodes for unattended operation. If static wireless sensor networks and cloud-computing can be integrated, then intensive computations that are needed to determine optimal evacuation routes in the presence of time-varying hazards can be offloaded to the cloud, but the disadvantages of limited battery life-time at the client side, as well as the high likelihood of system malfunction during an emergency still remain. By making use of the powerful sensing ability of smart phones, which are increasingly ubiquitous, this paper presents a cloud-enabled indoor emergency navigation framework to direct evacuees in a coordinated fashion and to improve the reliability and resilience for both communication and localization. By combining social potential fields (SPF) and a cognitive packet network (CPN)-based algorithm, evacuees are guided to exits in dynamic loose clusters. Rather than relying on a conventional telecommunications infrastructure, we suggest an ad hoc cognitive packet network (AHCPN)-based protocol to adaptively search optimal communication routes between portable devices and the network egress nodes that provide access to cloud servers, in a manner that spares the remaining battery power of smart phones and minimizes the time latency. Experimental results through detailed simulations indicate that smart human motion and smart network management can increase the survival rate of evacuees and reduce the number of drained smart phones in an evacuation process.

Augmented Reality for Emergency Situations in Buildings with the Support of Indoor Localization

“…Because we cannot always rely on the standard networking building infrastructure, another option is to utilize people's smart phones, such as in [8]. However, this approach has the drawback of requiring a large number of people, and we cannot always expect to find victims who are ready to assist the navigating system in the most dangerous areas.…”

Managing Crowds in Hazards With Dynamic Grouping

“…Experimental results indicate that this system is robust to network failures during an emergency. But because Oppcomms are susceptible to malicious attacks such as flooding or denial of service [47], a defence mechanism that uses a combination of identity-based signatures (IBS) and content-based message VOLUME 3, 2015 verification to detect malicious nodes is proposed and an infrastructure-less emergency navigation system is presented in [48] to guide evacuees with the aid of smart handsets and cloud servers. Also in [49] a WSN based distributed emergency management system that uses Dijkstra's algorithm to calculate shortest paths for evacuees is considered.…”

Cloud enabled emergency navigation using faster-than-real-time simulation

“…Ref. [19], [20] employ built-in camera on the smart phones to take snapshots and upload to servers to identify the location of evacuees. Based on the extracted data, the cloud-based emergency navigation system can provide appropriate paths for civilians.…”