A Disaster Evacuation System Using Smart Devices for Indoor Crisis Management in BLE Environments

This paper describes a novel disaster evacuation system using embedded systems such as smart devices for crisis and emergency management. In indoor environments deployed with the Bluetooth Low Energy(BLE) beacons, smart devices detect their indoor positions from beacon messages and interact with Map Server(MS) and Route Server(RS) in the Internet over the LTE and/or Wi-Fi functions. The MS and RS generate an optimal path to the nearest emergency exit based on a novel graph generation method for less route computation, called the Disaster Evacuation Graph(DEG), for each smart device. The DEG also enables efficient processing of some constraints in the computation of route, such as load balancing in situation of different capacities of paths or exits. All data interfaces among three system components, the MS, RS, smart devices, have been defined for modular implementation of our disaster evacuation system. Our experimental system has been deployed and tested in our building thoroughly and gives a good evidence that the modular design of the system and a novel approach to compute emergency route based on the DEG is competitive and viable.