Indoor incident situation awareness using a 3D indoor/outdoor spatial city model

Buildings are becoming a major subject of recent disasters resulting in huge amounts of casualty and damage costs for both public and emergency managers. Increased urbanization and complexity of contemporary structures complicates emergency response procedures and decision making especially in indoor emergency situations where much of the information stays unrevealed to emergency managers prior to entering the scenes exposing risk to peoples´ lives and assets. In addition, unfamiliarity with the indoor environments, limited visualization due to smoke, and collapsed and blocked areas all increase the difficulty of emergency response and rescue as well as unwanted wandering and uncertainty routing in indoor environments. To overcome such difficulties a new spatial city model is presented in this paper which enables integration of both indoor and outdoor GIS resulting in seamless spatial analysis and navigation between both areas. The model provides decision makers with detailed 3D indoor spatial, semantic, and geometric information that can be used to orient and navigate through the optimized paths inside buildings which would result in minimized rescue time. The proposed model is implemented using GIS tools for a case study building and the effectiveness of the model is discussed in the paper.