Active disaster response system for a smart building.

Chun-Yen Lin,Edward Chu,Jane Liu,Lun-Wei Ku

doi:10.3390/s140917451

Abstract

Disaster warning and surveillance systems have been widely applied to help the public be aware of an emergency. However, existing warning systems are unable to cooperate with household appliances or embedded controllers; that is, they cannot provide enough time for preparedness and evacuation, especially for disasters like earthquakes. In addition, the existing warning and surveillance systems are not responsible for collecting sufficient information inside a building for relief workers to conduct a proper rescue action after a disaster happens. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a proof of concept prototype, named the active disaster response system (ADRS), which automatically performs emergency tasks when an earthquake happens. ADRS can interpret Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) messages, published by an official agency, and actuate embedded controllers to perform emergency tasks to respond to the alerts. Examples of emergency tasks include opening doors and windows and cutting off power lines and gas valves. In addition, ADRS can maintain a temporary network by utilizing the embedded controllers; hence, victims trapped inside a building are still able to post emergency messages if the original network is disconnected. We conducted a field trial to evaluate the effectiveness of ADRS after an earthquake happened. Our results show that compared to manually operating emergency tasks, ADRS can reduce the operation time by up to 15 s, which is long enough for people to get under sturdy furniture, or to evacuate from the third floor to the first floor, or to run more than 100 m.

Highlights

Disaster warning and surveillance systems have been widely used by official agencies to send to the public emergency information before disasters strike
Our results show that compared to manually operating emergency tasks, active disaster response system (ADRS) can reduce the operation time by up to 15 s, which is long enough for people to get under sturdy furniture, or to evacuate from the third floor to the first floor, or to run more than 100 m
The ADRS described in this paper was designed to automatically perform emergency tasks when a strong earthquake is expected to strike in seconds in order to prevent the loss of lives, to reduce the chance of injuries and to minimize economic losses

Summary

Introduction

Disaster warning and surveillance systems have been widely used by official agencies to send to the public emergency information before disasters strike. The XML-based standard, Common Alert Protocol (CAP) [1], has been adopted in the USA, Canada, Australia and parts of the Asian Pacific region, including Taiwan and Japan. Official agencies in these regions can generate accurate warnings of many types of natural disasters a few seconds or minutes before they occur. In Taiwan, CAP-formatted warning messages issued by the Central Weather Bureau, the Water Resource Agency, Soil and Water Conservation Bureau and the Directorate General of Highways are converted by Google Public Alert [2] into short messages and delivered to mobile phone users via the Google personal assistant. CAP alert messages, though machine-readable, are consumed mostly by people to date

Methods

Results

Conclusion