Demonstrating an Evacuation Algorithm with Mobile Devices using an E-Scavenger Hunt Game

Abstract

Casualties in emergency situations are often caused by panic and in cases where building evacuation is required, they are often caused by a disorganized evacuation. This has motivated us to design a two-layer indoor evacuation system that takes advantage of two technologies all people carry on them, namely, cellular phones with cameras and RFID cards. The proposed system integrates QR-Code and RFID-based positioning with a routing system with mounted terminals and displays for guiding people with RFID tags out of a building. People with mobile devices with cameras use an application that resolves QR-Codes into web addresses that point to dynamically generated evacuation instructions. As a proof-of-concept, we have implemented this system with commercially available tools and components as an e-scavenger hunt game which uses SCAVY, our novel evacuation (routing) algorithm, to guide players around a building visiting different locations in a load balancing manner. In this demo, we are planning to deploy this e-scavenger game and the participants would be able to follow the progress of the game (evacuation) through a system monitor dashboard.

Szwedko, Jesse and Shaw, Callen and Connor, Alexander G. and Labrinidis, Alexandros and Chrysanthis, Panos K.. Demonstrating an Evacuation Algorithm with Mobile Devices using an E-Scavenger Hunt Game. Proceedings of the Eighth ACM International Workshop on Data Engineering for Wireless and Mobile Access, 49-52, June, 2009