A Mobile Crisis Management System for Emergency Services: from Concept to Field Test

During crisis situations, emergency services have to make a lot of crucial decisions, sometimes inevitably based on incomplete or outdated information caused by a lack of means of communication. Wireless ad hoc and mesh networks are a good solution for setting up emergency networks, as they do not rely on fixed infrastructure, can be set up quickly, and provide the necessary communication bandwidth. This paper introduces the GeoBIPS crisis management system architecture, which enables emergency services to collect and combine dynamic on-scene data with static information stored at local or distant servers, using a wireless mesh network. The usability of GeoBIPS has been proven by implementing the architecture on actual hardware which already has been evaluated positively by firemen during a real-life demonstration at a simulated house fire.