Abstract
Abstract. Search and rescue procedures for indoor environments are quite complicated due to the fact that much of the indoor information is unavailable to rescuers before physical entrance to the incident scene. Thus, decision making regarding the number of crew required and the way they should be dispatched in the building considering the various access points and complexities in the buildings in order to cover the search area in minimum time is dependent on prior knowledge and experience of the emergency commanders. Hence, this paper introduces the Search and Rescue Problem (SRP) which aims at finding best search and rescue routes that minimize the overall search time in the buildings. 3D BIM-oriented indoor GIS is integrated in the indoor route graph to find accurate routes based on the building geometric and semantic information. An Ant Colony Based Algorithm is presented that finds the number of first responders required and their individual routes to search all rooms and points of interest inside the building to minimize the overall time spent by all rescuers inside the disaster area. The evaluation of the proposed model for a case study building shows a significant improve in search and rescue time which will lead to a higher chance of saving lives and less exposure of emergency crew to danger.
Highlights
The time period right after a disaster strikes is the most critical time for saving victims’ lives, battling the consequences of the chaotic situation, and minimizing the damage caused to both public and properties (Diehl and van der Heide, 2005)
To improve the applicability of the indoor models for navigation applications new methodologies for indoor modelling have been proposed that integrate geometric and semantic information required for indoor navigation from Building Information Models (BIM) and CityGML (El-Mekawy et al, 2012; Isikdag et al, 2013)
To make such models more applicable to indoor emergency cases, 3D IESM (Indoor Emergency Spatial Model) proposes modifying IFC to contain mission critical data required by emergency responders in the scene and can be used to enrich route graphs for emergency response specific applications (Tashakkori et al, 2015a)
Summary
The time period right after a disaster strikes is the most critical time for saving victims’ lives, battling the consequences of the chaotic situation, and minimizing the damage caused to both public and properties (Diehl and van der Heide, 2005). Considering the importance of this thorough search in the building, an important research problem is how the first responder crew should be dispatched inside the building in order to minimize the search and rescue time This could be quite a complicated task due to various entrances, exits, staircases, and elevators in the building which creates various choices and difficulties in choosing the paths for rescuers and as of decisions on dispatching the crew depends on previous knowledge and experience of the incident managers. An ant colony based approach is proposed to solve it and find near optimum solutions for the problem Formulating and solving this problem will help decision makers to have a close estimate of the minimum number of crew needed to be taken to the incident scene, and by having detailed routes for each and every person, they can maximize efficiency of first response operations by minimizing the time each first responder spends indoors.
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