Citation

Panou M, Blythe P, Bekiaris E. Proc. Road Saf. Four Continents Conf. 2010; 15: 219-229.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, Conference Sponsor)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Many areas in the world have been and are possible to be affected by severe physical disasters, like earthquake, tsunamis, hurricanes, etc; whereas fire and floods usually occur as immediate results of these incidents. Fires with the most serious consequences (fires involving injuries, fatalities or extensive material damage) have mostly been the result of tunnel accidents (12 out of the 14 worst fires known worldwide). Over 200 people have died in Europe as result of tunnel fires in the last decade. Another major difficulty that is imposed in planning the logistics of private and public transport is the effect of a catastrophic earthquake. Moreover, terrorism is unfortunately a reality of our days, for several European countries. Highly selected targets are subways/trains and other PT terminals, but also bridges and tunnels. SAVE ME project, comes to give solution to the above problem. It aims to develop a system that detects natural and man-made disaster events in public transport terminals / vehicles and critical infrastructures (i.e. tunnels, and bridges) and that supports quick and optimal mass evacuation guidance, to save the lives of the general public and the rescuers, giving particular emphasis to the most vulnerable travelers (i.e. children, elderly and disabled). Its target application areas cover any PT vehicles station, hub and special transportation infrastructure (tunnel, bridge). The focus group are all passengers, including elderly, disabled, children, and, in general the most vulnerable traveller groups. Apart from the travelers, the needs of other stakeholders are to be examined within the project, namely the professional rescue crews and the infrastructure / emergency units operators. The project work starts with a thorough benchmarking on relevant technologies, algorithms and policies, to be taken into account in the formulation of early specifications for SAVE ME system, as well in the extraction of the use cases and application scenarios. An overview of the main, preliminary results arising from the benchmarking, is presented in the paper, together with generic specifications of the SAVE ME system.