Demonstrating Evacuation Algorithms with Mobile Devices using an e-Scavenger Hunt Game

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 proofof-concept, we have implemented this system with commercially available tools and components as an e-scaveger hunt game which uses 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.