Smart disaster response in vehicular tunnels: Technologies for search and rescue applications

Recently, the number of tunnels is increasing due to urbanization, and fire accidents in tunnels are likewise increasing. In particular, in a long tunnel of more than 1 km it is very difficult to track the exact location of a fire, accident vehicles, and the fire brigade, as well as whether a fire occurred. In this paper, we analyze various types of accidents that may occur in tunnel fires and propose detection, search, and rescue techniques to cope with them. For early detection of accidents, we propose various sensors using Internet of Things (IoT) technology and sensor networks to connect them. These sensors can detect not only a fire but also the position of the vehicle in which the fire is occurring in real time. We also propose a robotic system and operation technique that can be controlled by a fire fighter for more precise search operation. For rescue procedures, localization and tracking technology for fire fighters and robots is proposed. Finally, the efficiency of the proposed system was verified through actual performance tests, including simulations of actual placement and operation in tunnels. Through the construction of the equipment in an actual tunnel 1.9 km long, we show that the proposed system is good enough to cope with fire accidents, in terms of the delivery ratio of the collected data, fire recognition ratio, localization accuracy, and response delay.