LED wristbands for Cell-based Crowd Evacuation: an Adaptive Exit-choice Guidance System Architecture

TL;DR

This paper presents a system architecture for an adaptive crowd evacuation guidance system using LED wristbands and RFID technology, analyzing its performance under positioning uncertainties in a simulated scenario.

Contribution

It introduces a realistic deployment architecture for CellEVAC, integrating wearable LED wristbands and RFID, and evaluates its robustness to localization uncertainties.

Findings

CellEVAC is effective within limited positioning uncertainty ranges.

Reprogramming control logic improves evacuation performance under poor localization.

System architecture supports real-time coordination using RFID and LED wristbands.

Abstract

Cell-based crowd evacuation systems provide adaptive or static exit-choice indications that favor a coordinated group dynamic, improving evacuation time and safety. While a great effort has been made to modeling its control logic by assuming an ideal communication and positioning infrastructure, the architectural dimension and the influence of pedestrian positioning uncertainty have been largely overlooked. In our previous research, a Cell-based crowd evacuation system (CellEVAC) was proposed that dynamically allocates exit gates to pedestrians in a cell-based pedestrian positioning infrastructure. This system provides optimal exit-choice indications through color-based indications and a control logic module built upon an optimized discrete-choice model. Here, we investigate how location-aware technologies and wearable devices can be used for a realistic deployment of CellEVAC. We consider a simulated real evacuation scenario (Madrid Arena) and propose a system architecture for CellEVAC that includes: a controller node, a radio-controlled LED wristband subsystem, and a cell-node network equipped with active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices. These subsystems coordinate to provide control, display and positioning capabilities. We quantitatively study the sensitivity of evacuation time and safety to uncertainty in the positioning system. Results showed that CellEVAC was operational within a limited range of positioning uncertainty. Further analyses revealed that reprogramming the control logic module through a simulation-optimization process, simulating the positioning system's expected uncertainty level, improved the CellEVAC performance in scenarios with poor positioning systems.