A Cyber-Physical System Approach for Intelligent Building Emergency Evacuation Signage Guidance

Signage plays an important role in wayfinding in built environments, especially during emergency situations. However, the traditional light-based single-function emergency signage may lead occupants to a fire blocked route or a crowded exit resulting in a delayed evacuation and even more serious situation during an emergency evacuation. A cyber-physical systems (CPS) approach is expected to improve effective integration of event monitoring, real-time information communication, proactive danger identification, and intelligent guidance. This paper proposed a cyber-physical systems approach as a real-time emergency evacuation signage guidance system to guide occupants towards safe and fast evacuation routes considering fire source location and development trends, and human traffic flow trends in real time. The proposed system includes a fire detection sensor network system monitoring fire source and propagation, an occupant sensor network system evaluating the existing occupant traffic flow, and intelligent exit signage systems showing fire-free and crowd-free route directions. All fire detection sensor units communicate with each other to broadcast the danger location information. The occupant sensor network system detects the traffic flow coming in and going out for each direction, and detects and predicts crowd areas based on the traffic flow trends. The effective integration of computational resources (such as wireless sensors, real-time monitoring, data fusion, and prediction) with the building evacuation process will improve the evacuation performance. The opportunity offered by the adoption of a cyber-physical systems approach to make the evacuation process more intelligent and sustainable is discussed and the key benefits highlighted. The expected results would be the reduction of evacuation time and risk to encounter into fatal hazard areas with the installed intelligent signage guidance system, and eventually would be improvement of building evacuation performance and reduction of human injuries and fatalities.