Resilient emergency evacuation using opportunistic communications

Abstract

We describe an emergency evacuation support system (ESS) that employs short-range wireless communications among mobile devices carried by civilians. Emergency information is disseminated via opportunistic contacts between communication nodes (CNs), and each CN provides adaptive step-by-step navigation directions for its user during evacuation. Using mobile devices and opportunistic communications (oppcomms) allow ESS to operate when other means of communication are destroyed or overloaded. In this paper, we evaluate the resilience of oppcomms as used to enable evacuation support in ESS; we specifically consider the effect of CN failures on evacuation and communication performance. Our simulation experiments of evacuation of a three-floor office building show that ESS is highly resilient to node failures, and failure ratios up to 20 % are well-tolerated. © 2013 Springer-Verlag London.