Indoor Localization for Evacuation Management in Emergency Scenarios

In the context of building evacuation, for instance in case of fire or other emergency situations, the immediate identification of the evacuation path is of vital importance. Panic, lack of knowledge of the building, poor emergency signaling, obstructed evacuation paths are the common causes of inefficient evacuation, with possible tremendous consequences. The paper presents a comprehensive system for the efficient management and monitoring of workers' evacuation in the context of factories and office buildings. The system is composed of a central monitoring unit and a user app running on a mobile device. The monitoring unit acquires alert information (fire, smoke, etc.) from connected sensors deployed in the environment and communicates the position of such obstacles to the user app via the Wi-Fi network. Two versions of the user app have been designed, the former devoted to workers, the latter to rescuers. The worker app implements the indoor localization through received signal strength indication (RSSI) of purposely-deployed beacons and computes the best evacuation path planning, exploiting obstacle information from the central unit as well. Moreover, it communicates the worker's position to the central monitoring unit; in this way, a global real-time overview of the evacuation progress of all workers can be obtained and critical situations, such as trapped workers, can be promptly identified, thus guaranteeing more efficient rescue operations. The rescuer app supports rescuers to reach emergency sources and workers in trouble and to coordinate emergency operations. Despite the development of the proposed solution is still in progress, preliminary tests have demonstrated the effectiveness and usefulness of such an approach.