Evacuation System with Positive Acknowledgment
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current fire emergency systems often generate false alarms and lack confirmation that all building occupants have safely evacuated during a fire, as they cannot verify the receipt of evacuation messages or the ability of occupants to use the best egress route.
Innovation Solution
A central emergency notification and response system communicates with both fire and security systems to send confirmation messages to occupants near activated sensors, requesting verification of a fire event and evacuation capability, and provides staged evacuation instructions based on proximity, with acknowledgments used to determine if an actual fire exists and if occupants can safely evacuate.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If a fire alarm system activates notification appliances to alert all occupants, then evacuation is initiated, but false alarms occur without verification of actual fire events
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements feedback by sending evacuation messages to occupants and receiving acknowledgment messages in return. The central controller determines whether to initiate full evacuation based on receiving acknowledgments from multiple occupants, thereby verifying the actual fire event before activating notification appliances building-wide.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary action by sending evacuation messages to a selected group of occupants first (those near the alarm or on the same floor) before initiating full building evacuation. This preliminary step allows verification of the fire event's authenticity and severity before committing to full evacuation.
2Reliability
If evacuation messages are sent to all occupants, then complete evacuation is ensured, but unnecessary evacuation is triggered by false alarms
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies partial action by sending evacuation messages selectively to a subset of occupants first (those nearest to the alarm or on the affected floor) rather than all occupants simultaneously. If acknowledgments are received from multiple occupants, the system then escalates to sending messages to all occupants, ensuring complete evacuation only when necessary.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary evacuation notification to a selected group before initiating full building evacuation. This staged approach allows verification of the fire event's authenticity through occupant acknowledgments, preventing unnecessary full evacuations while ensuring rapid response when genuine threats exist.
3Loss of information
If the system monitors all occupants' evacuation status, then complete evacuation verification is achieved, but system complexity and communication overhead increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the occupant population into different groups based on their location relative to the alarm (same floor, nearby, distant). It sends evacuation messages to different segments at different times and monitors acknowledgments segment by segment, rather than attempting to monitor all occupants simultaneously as a single group.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs partial monitoring by first tracking acknowledgments from a selected group of occupants (those nearest to the alarm) before escalating to monitor all occupants. This staged monitoring approach reduces initial communication overhead while still enabling complete evacuation verification when necessary.
Data Source
AI summary
An emergency notification and response system is linked to a fire alarm system, a security system and to a communication network over which it sends and receives emergency messages to and from building occupants and to emergency response personnel. The emergency notification and response system comprises a notification module which operates to receive signals from a fire detection system and send one or more messages to building occupants to investigate the validity of a possible fire event, and to respond to the message with an indication that a fire event is in progress or not. Depending upon information received in the response, the notification module sends an evacuation message to a selected sub-set of the building occupants that includes instructions for evacuating the building.