Holonic System for Real-Time Emergency Management in Buildings

Emergency management can benefit from advanced information and communication technology (ICT), since it can support officers in charge of emergency management to deal with urgent decision within a really short deadline. Further enhancement can derive from the application of holonic systems, which typically deal with the unexpected. In fact, unexpected events may prevent the application of emergency plans, e. g. evacuation of people outside of a building in fire through a network of pre-determined paths. The holonic emergency management system, proposed in this paper, guarantees the shift to a contingent approach, leveraging the flexibility and adaptability to changing scenarios deriving from the holonic theory. Last but not least, the BIM integration provides all the building’s topological information. Such a technology can exploit general data to automatically detect unconventional ways out and arrange rescue operations in real-time. The developed system has been applied to the fire safety management of a large building in a university campus. The BIM model of the case study has been imported in a game environment where an unconventional pathfinding has been experienced.