A two-phase context-aware approach to emergency evacuation in smart buildings

Abstract

Evacuation in buildings during emergency situations is crucial to the safety of people, therefore a pragmatic response plan is desirable. Due to the lack of awareness in buildings, either occupants have to wait for instructions from the administration or to start following each other to find the best evacuation route for them on the basis of hit and trial method. In this regard, we present a context-aware smart architecture for evacuation that provides real-time evacuation routes to occupants with respect to their characteristics. We also put forward a two-phase group evacuation technique in which people evacuate in the form of groups under the supervision of experts so-called group leaders. The first phase handles the assembly of evacuees at their allotted collection points and in the second phase evacuees follow their group leaders to safe points. Group leaders are equipped with hand-held devices having live information of building, routes and their group members. A use case is also discussed in the paper as an application of the proposed technique.