Abstract
Indoor emergency navigation is one of the most prominent aspects of building design. Some of the major indoor emergency circumstances are fire hazards, intruder attack and break down of building in case of earth quake. In this research fire hazard is deliberated as indoor emergency and research focuses on efficient navigation of occupants during smoke and fire hazards. Fatalities occur in emergency due to inadequate information of hazard location and occupant’s unawareness to nearest egress point. This research proposes and implements an algorithm for indoor emergency navigation using wireless sensor networks (WSN). Algorithm primarily focus on furnishing safe available escape path-ways to occupants. Further algorithm calculates the shortest escape path from fire affected areas to the indoor exit point. These critical environments expects precise data possession and rapid response from detectors. Wireless smoke sensor node detects smoke events and sends information wirelessly to the base station. A base station comprises graphical user interface (GUI), implemented based on proposed algorithm. GUI is responsible to trace the disaster point, to evaluate the safe available paths and to compute the shortest path way from disaster point to the indoor exit point. Two scenarios of disasters such as smoke at single point ant smoke at multiple points are discussed in the experimental case studies. Eventually average system response time is measured for both the scenarios. Wireless sensor network is designed using Xbee RF modules (ZigBee standard) and GUI is implemented in Visual Studio.