An Intelligent Indoor Emergency Evacuation System Using IoT-Enabled WSNs for Smart Buildings

Abstract

Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) has played a vital role in emergency evacuation systems for smart buildings. Existing emergency evacuation systems do not consider future fire scenes, which leads to highly stretched paths or even trapping of individuals in the hazardous region. This article proposes a dynamic emergency evacuation system for shortest-safe path navigation (DESSN). The proposed work computes the shortest path for an individual toward a safe exit by considering the future spread of the fire region over time. The proposed approach creates a fireMap and a routeMap to show the fire spread and find a safe evacuation path. A modified Dijkstra algorithm is used to find the shortest path for a safe exit. This system is implemented using IoT-enabled WSN with sensor nodes, which are equipped with different types of sensors. Deployed sensor nodes communicate with the base station (BS) to plan every individual's shortest and safe evacuation path. Sensor nodes are used to detect fire within the monitoring public infrastructure. Furthermore, BS is used to compute all the logical and arithmetical operations on real-time data. The proposed approach finds the shortest-safe path considering the future fire spread that enables quick evacuation of evacuees during an emergency. It also helps to avoid detours. Simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches. © 2014 IEEE.