Description
Operational decision-making during and immediately after a disrupting event in a built environment — fire, structural failure, medical emergency, security incident — informed by real-time crowd state and indoor topology. This is the application context that consumes crowd-evacuation simulation outputs at design time and crowd-monitoring data at runtime. IndoorGML-grounded indoor maps provide the topological substrate for both.
Why it's hard
- Information must be fused across sensors with different latencies and reliabilities under time pressure.
- Indoor maps are rarely complete or up-to-date at the granularity emergency response requires.
- Evacuation models calibrated under normal conditions extrapolate poorly to emergency regimes.
- Communication infrastructure (WiFi, cellular) often degrades during the event itself.
- Coordination across responders, building-management, and public-safety systems is socio-technical.
Common approaches
- IndoorGML / OGC indoor-spatial-data models as the topological substrate.
- Pre-event evacuation simulation to validate egress capacity.
- Real-time occupancy dashboards from WiFi/BLE sensing.
- Mobile responder applications consuming indoor positioning + occupancy.
- Crowd-safety frameworks (defense-in-depth) for design-time risk reduction.