Integrated Evacuation and Rescue Management System in Response to Fire Incidents

Abstract

Indoor evacuation and rescue systems are necessary for responding to unexpected events. In the event of fire incidents, finding a proper evacuation route planning for impacted people as an immediate response and a real-time rescue planning for the trapped people is challenging. Several approaches are developed to provide an evacuation or rescue system by integrating building data and BIM models. However, none of them took the issues of both evacuation and rescue into account, and the provided solutions are not properly aware of dynamic environmental change variables derived from remotely sensed data. In this research, an evacuation and rescue management system is designed based on the integration of dynamic data of fire progress, people status, and routing data. This system consists of two stages: dynamic evacuation and dynamic rescue with priority assessment. First, the environmental data is gathered and integrated with the static building data. Then, leveraging a risk assessment method, the level of rout safety is evaluated and a dynamic risk-aware rout planning is generated for each person to evacuate safely and fast. Finally, in the rescue stage, rescuers are assigned to the trapped people using a priority assessment method so that the success rate of rescue operation increases. The same rout risk assessment is used to develop route planning for rescue team to ensure their safety. A system framework and architecture is proposed as a reference for emergency response systems and the system is evaluated over two state of art baselines under several scenarios in AnyLogic. The results demonstrates that dynamic evacuation and rescue with priority assessment approach helps to save more people, reduce total time, lower the risk of human injury and efficiently assigns relief resources to the trapped users.