A novel and interoperable communication gateway implementation for evacuation systems

Emergency situations, such as fire incidents or terrorist attacks, have imposed strongest safety requirements for crowds gathering. The enhancement of situation awareness, decision support and emergency notification systems that facilitate the safety and effectiveness of evacuation processes in a major incident is therefore of utmost importance. ICT, IoT and smart systems have gained much attention in many industries and application domains in the latest years as they can play a significant role by introducing novel systems and applications for intelligent, safe and fast evacuation of people. This work focuses on the development of a communication gateway that can support and improve emergency notification systems by providing appropriate, updated and accessible information to operators and people in affected zones in a reliable way. The presented approach uses an adaptable data model that can be applied to evacuation systems consisting of heterogeneous components, such as legacy systems, novel devices, sensors and actuators. The proposed communication gateway follows the publish/subscribe communication standard for real-time systems and is built on Data Distribution Service (DDS) of the Object Management Group (OMG). The evacuation systems are hereby transformed into interoperable, distributed, scalable, robust, and real-time IoT infrastructures.