Towards Situation Awareness and Decision Guidance in Complex Evacuation Scenarios

Evacuating buildings during emergencies like fires or terrorist attacks demands heightened environmental awareness, swift decision-making, and immediate action. In recent years, there has been a surge in research aimed at bolstering this process and assisting individuals involved through dedicated technical means. However, many questions still linger unanswered. This study elaborates on the concept and the initial design of a mobile application, constituting part of an intuitive evacuation assistance system tailored for evacuation leaders to enhance the situation awareness of individual leaders and the evacuation team in emergencies. Through the proposed system, leaders will receive real-time assistance regarding environmental hazards, evacuation procedures, requests for additional assistance, and the count of occupants in the building or specific areas, among other aspects, thereby enhancing overall situational awareness. Achieving this entails implementing a suitable sensory infrastructure, deploying intelligent algorithms to construct an artificial situation awareness, and crafting a user-centric interface design, all detailed in this contribution.The analytical discourse presented in this contribution high-lights the concept’s strength, while the mobile application’s and sensory infrastructure’s initial trials demonstrate its practical viability for real-world implementation.