Real-time evacuating routing during earthquake using a sensor network in an indoor environment

In this paper, we propose a framework for speeding the evacuation time of occupants in a building during an earthquake. The framework is based on the information collected from a sensor network, an algorithm to calculate evacuation routes, and dissemination of route information to occupants. The sensor network is used to determine the state of whether areas and spaces are transitable or blocked. State information is then used to calculate evacuation routes. We evaluate the performance of the proposed framework under the event of an earthquake by estimating the time in which an occupant is able to evacuate the building. Our results show that evacuation paths are sensitive to small blocking probabilities, which represent the intensity of earthquake damage of an indoor area in this paper. We also show that the information provided by a fully functional information network adopting the proposed framework simplifies the evacuation to the extent that an occupant experiences little or no confusion as to where to exit. In general, we see that an occupant may easily be routed to the exit to which evacuation may take the shortest time and that changes of evacuation routes may hardly occur. We show that the variations on evacuation times are small.