Building/environment Data/information System for Fine-Scale Indoor Location Specific Services

This paper describes a building/environment data and information system, called BeDIS for short. It is designed to support fine-scale, location specific services by smart devices and mobile applications for people in large smart buildings. Structured as a fog/mist, the system is scalable and responsive under overload; can function without Internet, WiFi and cell connections; and degrades gracefully when parts of it are damaged. During normal times, it enables hundreds and thousands of people to locate themselves sufficiently accurately and navigate amidst dense crowd and moving objects in the building via their mobile phones. When triggered by a disaster/emergency alert from responsible government agencies or the building safety system, BeDIS functions as a system of micro data servers for delivering locationand situation-specific emergency response instructions to people and attributes of the building, interior layout and objects in their immediate vicinities to support the choices of response actions of active devices and applications within fractions of a second to seconds. This paper describes its fog/mist structure, design and implementation. Keywords—Location specificity, Data mist, Indoor positioning and navigation, Location beacon, Active emergency response