Active Disaster Response System for Smart Buildings

In recent years, major natural disasters have made it more challenging for us to protect human lives. Examples include the 2011 Japan Tohoku earthquake and Typhoon Morakot in 2009 in Taiwan. However, modern disaster warning systems cannot automatically respond efficiently and effectively to disasters. As a result, it is necessary to develop an automatic response system to prevent, diminish or eliminate the damages caused by disasters. In this paper, we develop an active emergency disaster system to automatically process standard warning messages, such as CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) messages. After receiving official warning messages of earthquakes, our system automatically shuts down natural gas lines in order to prevent buildings from fire and opens the building doors for easy evacuation. Our system also stops elevators when they reach the closest floor. In addition, our system can be applied to hospitals to tell surgeons to pause ongoing operations, or to supermarkets to inform consumers of the way to exit the building. According to our experiment results, the proposed system can avoid possible dangers and save human lives during major disasters.