BIM-based indoor-emergency-navigation-system for complex buildings

The imminence of terrorist activities and the necessity of the maximum possible disaster preparedness in the sense of indoor-navigation support have been brought to evidence by several catastrophes, e.g., the fire at Istanbul Airport in May 2006 or the terror attacks on the London Underground on July 7, 2005. Since 2001 ten terror attacks have been thwarted only in Great Britain. For that reason the aim of the presented research project is to develop a solution for response and recovery to support rescuers in finding the shortest way within a public building and provide them with important information in their particular spatial context. Existing building information models (BIM) are used for displaying plans on mobile devices and for routing purposes. The indoor navigation system is based on wireless LAN (WLAN), ultra-wide-band (UWB), and radio frequency identification (RFID). These technologies are described in detail and an overview on data formats which are used to retrieve building data out of the BIM for generating routing networks is given.