Personalized Alert Notifications and Evacuation Routes in Indoor Environments

The preparedness phase is crucial in the emergency management process for reaching an adequate level of readiness to react to potential threats and hazards. During this phase, emergency plans are developed to establish, among other procedures, evacuation and emergency escape routes. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can support and improve these procedures providing appropriate, updated and accessible information to all people in the affected zone. Current emergency management and evacuation systems do not adapt information to the context and the profile of each person, so messages received in the emergency might be useless. In this paper, we propose a set of criteria that ICT-based systems could achieve in order to avoid this problem adapting emergency alerts and evacuation routes to different situations and people. Moreover, in order to prove the applicability of such criteria, we define a mechanism that can be used as a complement of traditional evacuation systems to provide personalized alerts and evacuation routes to all kinds of people during emergency situations in working places. This mechanism is composed by three main components: CAP-ONES for notifying emergency alerts, NERES for defining emergency plans and generating personalized evacuation routes, and iNeres as the interface to receive and visualize these routes on smartphones. The usability and understandability of proposed interface has been assessed through a user study performed in a fire simulation in an indoor environment. This evaluation demonstrated that users considered iNeres easy to understand, to learn and to use, and they also found very innovative the idea to use smartphones as a support for escaping instead of static signals on walls and doors

Modeling an ontology on accessible evacuation routes for emergencies

Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. However, this is a challenging goal for researchers and professionals due to the diverse pool of prospective users, e.g. people with disabilities as well as other vulnerable groups. Moreover, in the event of an emergency situation, many people could become vulnerable because of exceptional circumstances such as stress, an unknown environment or even visual impairment (e.g. fire causing smoke). Within this scope, a crucial activity is to notify affected people about safe places and available evacuation routes. In order to address this need, we propose to extend an ontology, called SEMA4A (Simple EMergency Alert 4 [for] All), developed in a previous work for managing knowledge about accessibility guidelines, emergency situations and communication technologies. In this paper, we introduce a semi-automatic technique for knowledge acquisition and modeling on accessible evacuation routes. We introduce a use case to show applications of the ontology and conclude with an evaluation involving several experts in evacuation procedures. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

SEMA4A : a knowledge base for accessible evacuation and alert notifications in emergencies

When an emergency occurs or is going to occur, the aim of organizations and agencies involved in the response phase is to restore quickly a safe situation and reduce the number of victims and damages. The notification of information about the kind of emergency, its characteristics, the location of safe places and available procedures for reaching them has a crucial role in order to facilitate the evacuation of citizens. Several organizations and agencies have been promoting the development of Information Technology (IT) tools, called Emergency Response Information Systems (ERIS) for the management of the activities performed in response to the emergencies. In particular, these systems provide modules for collecting, updating and notifying information about imminent disasters to potential affected people. Such notifications can be communicated through different channels, like websites, emails, text or voice messages. But to effectively inform people about an emergency, the notifications should be adapted automatically to each user’s profile (e.g. functional or contextual disabilities, elderly, children), the kind of emergency (e.g. typhoon, earthquake, tornado), the communication channel (e.g. PDAs, smartphones, pagers) and any other exceptional circumstances (e.g. interrupted roads, collapsed exit, dangerous area). For example, when a fire occurs in a building, a blind person should be alerted by audio signals or text messages (assuming she has a text-to-speech software on her device). Moreover, information can guide her to an assistant that can help her in reaching the exit. The efficacy of emergency notifications depends also on how different Emergency Notification Systems (ENS) communicate and interoperate with each other in order to share information even with different terminologies and types of disasters. For avoiding semantic incompatibilities, a common language is needed to improve the coordination not only among systems, but also among users. In fact, codifying the semantics of shared information in an accessible way could help citizens in interpreting notifications without misunderstandings and emergency operators in communicating among them. Modelling knowledge on alerting and evacuation processes, using expert systems, neural networks or ontologies, can help in personalizing emergency notifications and evacuation procedures. In particular, we posit that the knowledge base required for the personalization mechanism should cover at least four domains: accessibility, technology, emergency and evacuation procedures. These domains cover the factors to take into account for adapting the notifications. Consequently, the accessibility is considered a representation for the user’s profile, technology for the interactive devices and the communication channel, emergency for the characteristics of the situation and evacuation procedures for the escaping measures. In this thesis, we propose the design of an ontology called SEMA4A (Simple Emergency Alerts 4 [for] All). The ontology is a knowledge representation based on semantic rules that allows to model articulated knowledge through the definition of complex relations among concepts from different domains. This choice is also related to the possibility of using specific tools based on first order logic for verifying the validity and the integrity of the proposed representation. The development of the ontology has to meet the objectives that motivated this research work: consistency, completeness, understandability and interoperability with existent systems and protocols. For the consistency, we have run a reasoner tool called Pellet obtaining that there are not redundancies and the mapping is syntactically coherent. Concerning completeness and understandability, we have performed a quantitative and a qualitative evaluation. The goal of the quantitative evaluation is to compute three well-known functions in the domain of ontological engineering: precision, coverage and accuracy. These three measures evaluate how much the ontology is representative respect to the domains of interest (i.e. accessibility, emergency, evacuation and technology). In the qualitative evaluation, we have involved international experts in accessibility, evacuation and emergency to test the validity of the proposed mapping with respect to their expertise. Finally, the interoperability has been guaranteed codifying SEMA4A with a standard language called OWL (Ontology Web Language) and following formal recommendations published as an initiative of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). Taking into account the results obtained from the evaluations, we posit that the proposed ontology addresses needed information for sharing and integrating alert notifications about emergencies and evacuation procedures into existent solutions (i.e. notification mechanisms, information systems, communication protocols). As proof of this, we have developed three use cases in collaboration with the DEI Group of the University Carlos III of Madrid. SEMA4A has been applied for adapting available information considering several factors: the user’s profile, the kind of emergency, the communication channel and other exceptional circumstances. The first use case, called CAPONES, sends emergency alerts adapting the content and the visualization to the needs of involved users. The second system is NERES which aims at generating and notifying personalized evacuation routes. The last case is the EmergenSYS platform that provides three different mobile tools for sending alerts in two directions: from citizens to emergency operators and from emergency operators to citizens. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Durante una emergencia, el objetivo de las organizaciones y agencias involucradas es de responder a la misma para restaurar rápidamente una situación segura y reducir el número de las víctimas y los daños. En este ámbito es fundamental enviar a los ciudadanos afectados notificaciones sobre la emergencia especificando el tipo, las características, la ubicación de los lugares seguros y cómo llegar a ellos. De esta forma se pueden facilitar el desalojo y la evacuación de la área peligrosa. Varias organizaciones y agencias han estado colaborando en el desarrollo de los Sistemas Informativos para la Gestión de Emergencias (SIGEs). Estos sistemas proporcionan deferentes servicios basados en las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación (TIC). Uno de ellos es la gestión de la información relacionada con la situación y su consecuente notificación a los ciudadanos a través de diferentes canales, como por ejemplo sitios web, correos electrónicos, mensajes de voz y texto. Para que las notificaciones sean efectivas, es necesario proporcionar un mecanismo de personalización que adapte automáticamente la información a enviar teniendo en cuenta el perfil de cada usuario (por ejemplo, discapacidades funcionales o contextuales, ancianos y niños), el tipo de emergencia (por ejemplo, incendios, terremotos y tornados), el canal de comunicación (por ejemplo dispositivos móviles, dispositivos inteligentes y correo electrónicos) y cualquier otra circunstancia que se pueda considerar relevante (por ejemplo, carreteras cortadas o colapsadas y zonas peligrosas). Por ejemplo, cuando se produce un incendio en un edificio, una persona invidente puede ser alertada por una señal audio o un mensaje de texto si tiene instalado en su teléfono un convertidor de texto a voz. No solo el tipo de alerta, si no también el contenido de la misma tiene que adaptarse. En el caso del invidente, la información recibida le guiará hacia un asistente que le pueda ayudar a llegar a la salida. La eficacia de las notificaciones de emergencia depende también de cómo los diferentes SIGEs comunican y colaboran entre sí con el fin de compartir información. En este caso, hay que tener en cuenta que cada sistema podría utilizar una terminología diferente. Para evitar cualquier incompatibilidad semántica, se necesita un lenguaje común con el objetivo de mejorar la comunicación no sólo entre los SIGEs, sino también hacia los usuarios. De esta forma, se evitarían posibles malentendidos en la interpretación de la información recibida por parte de los ciudadanos y compartida entre los operadores de emergencia. Una posible solución a esta necesidad consiste en modelar el conocimiento sobre las alertas de emergencias y los procesos de evacuación desarrollando un sistema basado en la inteligencia artificial, como por ejemplo sistemas expertos, redes neuronales u ontologías. En particular, se considera que el conocimiento a modelar necesario para definir el mecanismo de personalización debería cubrir por lo menos lo siguientes cuatros dominios: accesibilidad , tecnología, emergencia y evacuación. Cada uno de estos dominios representa un factor especifico de la personalización. La accesibilidad se refiere a las características definidas en el perfil del usuario. La tecnología contiene los tipos de dispositivos y el canal utilizados para recibir información. La emergencia representa todo lo que se conoce sobre la situación critica mientras la evacuación incluye los procedimientos y las medidas a tomar para evacuar. En esta tesis, se propone el diseño de una ontología llamada SEMA4A (Simple Emergency Alerts 4 [for] All, Alertas de Emergencias Simples para Todos). La ontología es una representación de una área de conocimiento basada en la definición de reglas semánticas. A través de estas reglas, es posible definir modelos complejos que relacionen conceptos provenientes de diferentes dominios. Además, el uso de ontologías nos permite aplicar una serie de herramientas basadas en la lógica del primer orden para verificar la validez y la integridad de la representación resultante. El diseño de la ontología tiene que cumplir con los objetivos que han motivado este trabajo: la coherencia, la integridad, la comprensión y la interoperabilidad con los sistemas y los protocolos existentes. Cada una de estas propiedades ha sido evaluada utilizando técnicas especificas. Para la coherencia, se ha utilizado un razonador llamado Pellet. El resultado obtenido confirma que la definición de los conceptos y de las relaciones incluidas en SEMA4A ses semanticamente coherente. En cuanto a la integridad y la comprensión, hemos realizado dos tipos de evaluación: una cuantitativa y otra cualitativa. El objetivo de la evaluación cuantitativa es calcular tres funciones ya conocidas en el campo de la ingeniería ontológica: cover, accuracy y precision. Estas funciones nos permiten medir cuanto la ontología es representativa para los dominios de interés. En el ámbito de la evaluación cualitativa, hemos involucrado a expertos internacionales en materia de accesibilidad, evacuación y emergencia para qué opinen sobre SEMA4A y su valor respecto a la experiencia propia de cada uno. Por último, se ha cumplido con la interoperabilidad implementando SEMA4A con un lenguaje estándar llamado OWL (Ontology Web Language, Lenguaje Web para Ontologías) y siguiendo las lineas guías publicadas como iniciativa de la W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). Teniendo en cuenta los resultados obtenidos al finalizar las evaluaciones, finalmente podemos afirmar que la ontología propuesta en esta tesis puede ser utilizada por otros SIGEs para personalizar y compartir la información disponible sobre situaciones de emergencia y procedimientos de evacuación. Como prueba de ello, hemos desarrollado tres casos de uso en colaboración con el Grupo de DEI de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. SEMA4A se ha aplicado como parte del mecanismo de adaptación de la información disponible teniendo en cuenta el perfil del usuario, el tipo de emergencia, el canal de comunicación y otras circunstancias excepcionales. El primer caso de uso, llamado CAPONES, envía alertas de emergencia personalizando el contenido y la visualización del mensaje (texto, imágenes o realidad aumentada) para mejor cumplir con las necesidades de los usuarios involucrados. El segundo sistema es NERES cuyo objetivo es adaptar y notificar las rutas de evacuación respecto al plano de emergencia oficial. El último caso es la plataforma EmergenSYS que ofrece tres aplicaciones móviles diferentes. La primera permite a los ciudadanos de notificar incidentes al centro de operaciones en calidad de testigos o victimas. La segunda es un botón de pánico que el ciudadano puede presionar para que automáticamente llegue una notificación al centro de operaciones. La tercera permite a los ciudadanos recibir información útil acerca de una emergencia cercana, incluyendo también la ruta de evacuación personalizada

A Participatory Agent-Based Simulation for Indoor Evacuation Supported by Google Glass

Indoor evacuation systems are needed for rescue and safety management. One of the challenges is to provide users with personalized evacuation routes in real time. To this end, this project aims at exploring the possibilities of Google Glass technology for participatory multiagent indoor evacuation simulations. Participatory multiagent simulation combines scenario-guided agents and humans equipped with Google Glass that coexist in a shared virtual space and jointly perform simulations. The paper proposes an architecture for participatory multiagent simulation in order to combine devices (Google Glass and/or smartphones) with an agent-based social simulator and indoor tracking services

Investigation of potential cognition factors correlated to fire evacuation

The design of a navigation system to support indoor fire evacuation depends not only on speed but also a relatively thorough consideration of the cognition factors. This study has investigated potential cognition factors which can affect the human behaviours and decision making during fire evacuation by taking a survey among indoor occupants in age of 20s under designed virtual scenarios. It mainly focuses on two aspects of Fire Responses Performances (FRP), i.e. indoor familiarity (spatial cognition) and psychological stress (situ-ated cognition). The collected results have shown that these cognition factors can be affected by gender and user height and they are correlated with each other in certain ways. It has also investigated users‟ attitudes to the navigation services under risky and non-risky conditions. The collected answers are also found to be correlated with the selected FRP factors. These findings may help to further design of personalized indoor navigation support for fire evacuation

Towards the internet of agents: an analysis of the internet of things from the intelligence and autonomy perspective

Recently, the scientific community has demonstrated a special interest in the process related to the integration of the agent-oriented technology with Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. Then, it arises a novel approach named Internet of Agents (IoA) as an alternative to add an intelligence and autonomy component for IoT devices and networks. This paper presents an analysis of the main benefits derived from the use of the IoA approach, based on a practical point of view regarding the necessities that humans demand in their daily life and work, which can be solved by IoT networks modeled as IoA infrastructures. It has been presented 24 study cases of the IoA approach at different domains ––smart industry, smart city and smart health wellbeing–– in order to define the scope of these proposals in terms of intelligence and autonomy in contrast to their corresponding generic IoT applications.En los últimos años, la comunidad científica ha mostrado un interés especial en torno al proceso de integración de la tecnología orientada a agentes sobre plataformas de Internet de las Cosas (IoT, por sus siglas en inglés). Surge así, un nuevo enfoque denominado Internet de los Agentes (IoA, por sus siglas en inglés) como una alternativa para añadir un componente de inteligencia y autonomía sobre los dispositivos y redes de IoT. El presente trabajo muestra un análisis de los principales beneficios derivados del uso del enfoque del IoA, visto desde las actuales necesidades que el ser humano demanda en su trabajo y vida cotidiana, las cuales pueden ser resueltas por redes de IoT modeladas como infraestructuras de IoA. Se plantea un total de 24 casos prácticos de aplicaciones de IoA en diferentes dominios ––industria, ciudad, y salud y bienestar inteligente–– a fin de determinar el alcance de dichas aplicaciones en términos de inteligencia y autonomía respecto a sus correspondientes aplicaciones genéricas de IoT.This study was founded by the Ecuadorian Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (SENESCYT)

Rediseño de rutas de evacuación de una empresa de servicios

El diseño y rediseño de rutas de evacuación es uno de los pasos iniciales y fundamentales en el proceso de prevención de riesgos, debido a que permite evaluar, clasificar y predecir situaciones de emergencias que pudieran poner en peligro la vida de personas. Se sabe que durante una contingencia (evento inesperado), ni la mejor planificación ante desastres podrá eliminar una catástrofe; sin embargo, este tipo de estudios permite a las personas estar preparadas ante eventualidades, ya sea causadas por la propia naturaleza o por seres humanos. La empresa en la cual se llevó a cabo el estudio se dedica a la generación, control, distribución y comercialización de energía eléctrica en México; recientemente ha realizado una serie de reformas en sus instalaciones y procesos, lo que obliga al rediseño de rutas de evacuación debido a cambios estructurales, objetivo de este artículo. La metodología a seguir contempla los siguientes pasos: delimitación del estudio, identificación del centro de trabajo, rediseño de rutas de evacuación, señalización, y presentación de los resultados obtenidos. Los resultados obtenidos fueron el rediseño de las rutas de evacuación y la señalización de todas las áreas del edificio. El estudio servirá de base para investigaciones futuras. The design and redesign of evacuation routes is one of the key initial steps in the process and risk prevention, because it allows assess, classify and predict emergency situations that could endanger the lives of people. Experience has shown that during a contingency (unexpected event), even the best disaster planning may remove a catastrophe, but this type of study allows people to be prepared to contingencies, whether caused by nature or by beings humans. The company that carried out the study is dedicated to electricity generation, control, distribution and commercialization in Mexico, and recently has made a series of reforms in their facilities and processes, forcing the evacuation routes redesign due to structural changes, target this article. The methodology followed includes the following steps: Delimitation of the study, identification of the work center, evacuation route redesign, signage, and presentation of results. The results were the redesign of evacuation routes and signage of all areas of the building. This study will provide the basis for future research

Rediseño de rutas de evacuación de una empresa de servicios

El diseño y rediseño de rutas de evacuación es uno de los pasos iniciales y fundamentales en el proceso de prevención de riesgos, debido a que permite evaluar, clasificar y predecir situaciones de emergencias que pudieran poner en peligro la vida de personas. Se sabe que durante una contingencia (evento inesperado), ni la mejor planificación ante desastres podrá eliminar una catástrofe; sin embargo, este tipo de estudios permite a las personas estar preparadas ante eventualidades, ya sea causadas por la propia naturaleza o por seres humanos. La empresa en la cual se llevó a cabo el estudio se dedica a la generación, control, distribución y comercialización de energía eléctrica en México; recientemente ha realizado una serie de reformas en sus instalaciones y procesos, lo que obliga al rediseño de rutas de evacuación debido a cambios estructurales, objetivo de este artículo. La metodología a seguir contempla los siguientes pasos: delimitación del estudio, identificación del centro de trabajo, rediseño de rutas de evacuación, señalización, y presentación de los resultados obtenidos. Los resultados obtenidos fueron el rediseño de las rutas de evacuación y la señalización de todas las áreas del edificio. El estudio servirá de base para investigaciones futuras.The design and redesign of evacuation routes is one of the key initial steps in the process and risk prevention, because it allows assess, classify and predict emergency situations that could endanger the lives of people. Experience has shown that during a contingency (unexpected event), even the best disaster planning may remove a catastrophe, but this type of study allows people to be prepared to contingencies, whether caused by nature or by beings humans. The company that carried out the study is dedicated to electricity generation, control, distribution and commercialization in Mexico, and recently has made a series of reforms in their facilities and processes, forcing the evacuation routes redesign due to structural changes, target this article. The methodology followed includes the following steps: Delimitation of the study, identification of the work center, evacuation route redesign, signage, and presentation of results. The results were the redesign of evacuation routes and signage of all areas of the building. This study will provide the basis for future research

Coordinated Transit Response Planning and Operations Support Tools for Mitigating Impacts of All-Hazard Emergency Events

This report summarizes current computer simulation capabilities and the availability of near-real-time data sources allowing for a novel approach of analyzing and determining optimized responses during disruptions of complex multi-agency transit system. The authors integrated a number of technologies and data sources to detect disruptive transit system performance issues, analyze the impact on overall system-wide performance, and statistically apply the likely traveler choices and responses. The analysis of unaffected transit resources and the provision of temporary resources are then analyzed and optimized to minimize overall impact of the initiating event

Artificial Intelligence-based Smarter Accessibility Evaluations for Comprehensive and Personalized Assessment

The research focuses on utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms to enhance accessibility for people with disabilities (PwD) in three areas: public buildings, homes, and medical devices. The overarching goal is to improve the accuracy, reliability, and effectiveness of accessibility evaluation systems by leveraging smarter technologies. For public buildings, the challenge lies in developing an accurate and reliable accessibility evaluation system. AI can play a crucial role by analyzing data, identifying potential barriers, and assessing the accessibility of various features within buildings. By training ML algorithms on relevant data, the system can learn to make accurate predictions about the accessibility of different spaces and help policymakers and architects design more inclusive environments. For private places such as homes, it is essential to have a person-focused accessibility evaluation system. By utilizing machine learning-based intelligent systems, it becomes possible to assess the accessibility of individual homes based on specific needs and requirements. This personalized approach can help identify barriers and recommend modifications or assistive technologies that can enhance accessibility and independence for PwD within their own living spaces. The research also addresses the intelligent evaluation of healthcare devices in the home. Many PwD rely on medical devices for their daily living, and ensuring the accessibility and usability of these devices is crucial. AI can be employed to evaluate the accessibility features of medical devices, provide recommendations for improvement, and even measure their effectiveness in supporting the needs of PwD. Overall, this research aims to enhance the accuracy and reliability of accessibility evaluation systems by leveraging AI and ML technologies. By doing so, it seeks to improve the quality of life for individuals with disabilities by enabling increased independence, fostering social inclusion, and promoting better accessibility in public buildings, private homes, and medical devices