Design and implementation of an intelligent emergency evacuation system

Abstract

As the result of urbanization in many developing countries, people migrate towards cities. This leads to the construction of high rise buildings in metropolitan cities to accommodate huge influx of people. In an emergency situation like fire or terrorist attack, safe evacuation of people is important. This makes emergency evacuation problem one of the major concerns. The proposed intelligent evacuation system employs FPGA based concurrent multi door control and fire warning system during an emergency condition. The system also provides the information to avoid the fire occurred floor to ease the evacuation. Stairwell is the safest access in multi-storey buildings through which people can evacuate during fire disaster. Hence, the evacuation study using stairwell is crucial in emergency evacuation. An analytical approach has been implemented using petri nets to model the emergency evacuation system considering human behavior on emergency. In this work the evacuation is modeled considering the visibility of exits, human behavior and stampede at the stairs using petri-nets. The time delay in evacuation considering variation in the number of people inside the building is obtained using TimeNET petri net tool.