Evacuation Supporting System Based on IoT Components †

Abstract

The response to natural disasters usually requires evacuation procedures that should be followed in a quick and orderly fashion. While census data provide information on the population distribution during sleeping hours, the evacuation procedure may arrive at any moment of the day, even when people are not at home; e.g., in their daily activities. This particular situation causes preparedness plans based on census information to become minimally effective; therefore, more dynamic and context-aware strategies are required to properly address these evacuation processes. In this paper, an evacuation supporting system, based on IoT-networked devices, is proposed to guide people to safe places or shelters once the alert of an extreme event has been issued. The system is interactive and support crowd-sensing; this allows people to upload information on the state of the routes and the shelters, thus keep an updated status of the evacuation routes. The contribution of the paper is twofold. On one side, an evolutionary algorithm is proposed to provide coverage in a breadcrumb deployment of information posts called witness units. On the other, an application based on geographical information system is presented as an intermediary between the witness units and the users; this application guides people towards safe places or shelters.

An IoT-based infrastructure to enhance self-evacuations in natural hazardous events

“…In [35] a greedy solution was introduced to address such a problem, and in [9] a meta-heuristic approach based on a genetic algorithm was proposed. The general idea for deploying the Ws is to place the units in such a way that an evacuee (i.e., a mobile unit) has a maximum coverage distance D between any two of them.…”

“…This paper extends a conference presentation in which the authors introduce the basic concepts of this proposal [9]. This extension includes a complete definition of the IoT-based infrastructure, its validation, a simplified strategy to deployment it, a real implementation of the infrastructure nodes and simulations real measurements that show the potential performance of a particular evacuation system.…”

“…The design of these systems should consider the participation of evacuees as users, in addition to the regular ones, e.g., first responders and emergency managers, since the former are direct producers and consumers of information about the evacuation process and extreme event. Therefore, these systems should be interactive and hopefully provide ambient intelligence (AmI) through distributed and autonomous solutions [9].…”

Time-Aware and Temperature-Aware Fire Evacuation Path Algorithm in IoT-Enabled Multi-Story Multi-Exit Buildings

“…Wireless sensor networks for real-time fire detection are designed and evaluated in [ 9 ] to enable fire safety in the home environment. An evacuation support system in large areas is proposed in [ 10 ]. The system’s architecture includes the emergency operation centers, localized operation center, smartphone app and wireless backbone networks are described in [ 10 ] to show that evacuation support system based on IoT network can adapt to dynamic conditions in the networks and guide the people to the safe places.…”

“…An evacuation support system in large areas is proposed in [ 10 ]. The system’s architecture includes the emergency operation centers, localized operation center, smartphone app and wireless backbone networks are described in [ 10 ] to show that evacuation support system based on IoT network can adapt to dynamic conditions in the networks and guide the people to the safe places. In [ 11 ], they proposed an integrated framework, including the cloud computing center to collect and compute the system information and an indoor localization system based on Bluetooth to locate and evacuate evacuees to the safe zone.…”