Occupant movement tracking in high-rise building evacuation planning using RFID technology and SMS gateway

Efficient evacuation of high-rise buildings is important. In the case of a fire accident all occupants must move to the assembly point as fast as possible. Since a large number of occupants are involved crowd movement must be quick and accurate at every movement. Experiences from previous buildings accident show that many people died because they were trapped inside the building and the rescuer had no information to track the occupant. This study presents a proposed model for occupant tracking in high-rise buildings for evacuation planning. Using long range RFID tags embedded on each occupant, their movement inside the building can be tracked. The dynamic position of each occupant during the movement will be monitored using an evacuation central system. A role based system was developed to detect a specific ID from an RFID tag using several long range readers. Once the position of an occupant is detected by a reader, the evacuation central system will be able to determine the position and status of evacuation. Our proposed evacuation central system is integrated with a notification system, which uses SMS (short message service). At predetermined times the evacuation central system will generate the status of each occupant and notify the building management or rescue team through SMS. Our proposed tracking and notification system has enhanced the performance of evacuation and provided early identification of trapped occupants in a high-rise building.