A Decision Support System for Building Evacuation Based on the EMILI SITE Environment

This article introduces a decision support system for determining a safe and short (in both time and distance sense) evacuation path and for increasing situation awareness in the case of a hazard in buildings of large critical infrastructures (CIs). CIs are infrastructures that are complex, difficult to monitor and with an integrated SCADA system, such as airports or metro stations. The FP-7 project Emergency Management In Large Infrastructures (EMILI) aims at a new generation of data management and control systems in CIs by building a further data management layer on already existing systems. Part of the EMILI project is the implementation of a simulation and training environment (SITE). The introduced decision support system is meant to be integrated into SITE, using results from event processing and an optimization algorithm to determine evacuation paths and increase the awareness of the safety situation. The decision support system was developed for an airport use case.