Indoor navigation and information sharing for collaborative fire emergency response with BIM and multi-user networking

Collaboration in indoor fire emergencies requires participants to share various information regarding individuals, fires, and resources. To facilitate response actions, this study develops a system to provide the necessary information, calculate route guidance for escape and rescue, track victim locations, and share resources with participants promptly. The system includes a pathfinding module using geometries of building information models, a positioning module fusing inertial sensor data and wireless signals via a particle filter, an information exchange module that delivers emergency-related properties, and an information sharing module that distributes information through a multi-user environment. Moreover, a two-stage pathfinding algorithm and a hybrid positioning approach are proposed to improve computational efficiency and localization accuracy. Through comparative evaluation, the system is validated to reduce the computational time by 89.29% and lessen the positioning error to 1.36 m. The study is expected to provide explicit insights into developing digital twins for collaborative emergency response.