Increasing situational awareness of indoor emergency simulation using multilayered ontology-based floor plan representation

Abstract

Indoor emergency is a challenging research domain. It has to deal with dynamic situations, unexpected consequence of incidents, many entities involved such as human and building elements. Emergency simulation cannot avoid these various and dynamic information. This research proposes a multilayer of ontology-based floor plan representation in order to describe how the simulation goes with these complexities. Our approach uses ontology to model a floor plan into various perspectives e.g., AccessibilityPerspective, ControllingPerspective. Each perspective is used to support different purposes. For example, AccessibilityPerspective is used for way finding and navigation. These perspectives are represented by multilayer of graphs, one perspective per one graph. The research objective is to increase users' situational awareness in the indoor emergency simulation. The are two main advantages in this model. First is a capability to handle dynamic situations and consequences of emergency using ontology and inference rules. Second is the use of multilayered graph-based representation in describing the floor plan's situation in various perspectives and overcoming information overload. With these advantages, users can notice how the simulation goes, what and where have been changed in a glance. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.