GoFAST: A Group-Based Emergency Guiding System with Dedicated Path Planning for Mobile Users Using Smartphones

This paper proposes a group-based emergency guiding system for mobile users using smartphones, called Go FAST, which can model the spatiotemporal mobility of indoor people. A dedicated path can be determined to provide the shortest evacuation time for each group of nearby people. The Go FAST system considers the corridor capacities and lengths, exit capacities, concurrent motion, distribution of indoor people, and dedicated escape path to accurately estimate the evacuation time for each group. Based on the estimated evacuation time, the evacuation load can evenly distributed among exits to minimize the total evacuation time. Go FAST can alleviate the congestion of all corridors and exits to reduce the total evacuation time as much as possible. An Android-based prototype with iBeacon indoor localization is implemented to verify the feasibility of our Go FAST system. Simulation results show that Go FAST outperforms existing schemes and can achieve the shortest evacuation time for group-based emergency guiding.