A hybrid IoT-based approach for emergency evacuation

Abstract

Today's Internet of Things (IoT) and its enabling technologies offer efficient solutions for utilizing available resources and integrating different techniques. In high-risk environments, IoT has already shown to have significant potential to provide safe, reliable, and efficient solutions. This paper proposes a hybrid emergency evacuation approach using IoT and combines it with cloud computing. The proposed approach attempts to utilize the advantages of both infrastructures (IoT and cloud) to calculate evacuation paths in real time during emergency evacuation. It attempts to maximize the safety of the suggested evacuation paths by adapting to the characteristics of the hazard, evacuees’ behavior, and environmental conditions. Our approach covers two emergency navigators: A Localized Emergency Navigator (LEN) and a High-Risk Emergency Navigator (HREN). Depending on some defined emergency factors, our approach decides which navigator to execute. It also handles diversified evacuation issues, such as when people get locked in a safe, however, a dead-end area of a building under emergency. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed approach achieves better outcomes in terms of survival rate and evacuation efficiency compared to the traditional algorithm.