A Real-Time Emergency Evacuation Management System (REEMS) Using Indoor Localization Technology

When an emergency occurs in a building structure, real-time occupants' location and their evacuation decisions are important for the overall evacuation time. It is difficult for the evacuees to perform reasonable behavior in the unknown environments during emergency situations. Communication support is of the utmost importance in such scenarios. The ideal communication support system consists of information collection system, information distribution system and social media etc. The information collection system is used to collect the information including evacuees' location and situational awareness by evacuation officers; while the distribution system is to deliver real-time evacuation information to evacuees. Indoor positioning sensing and cloud computation technologies allow the evacuation officers to collect the real-time emergency information such as the evacuees' locations and the calculated density. Provided with the situational awareness data, the evacuation officers in charge can make the corresponding real-time evacuation routes for the evacuees at different locations. This paper proposes a framework for real-time emergency evacuation management system enabling the interaction between evacuation officers and evacuees during emergency situations. The process for performing the pilot study has been introduced. The current system is limited by the power availability and internet accessibility in the physical environment. The REEMS system can be improved by considering the evacuees' panic state during emergency and integrating the psychological acceptance extent for evacuation plan.