1. IOT – Firefighting Example

2. Smart Firefighting
Smart firefighting involves gathering, storing, exchanging, analyzing, and integrating information from a wide range of databases and sensor networks.

3. Gathering Information
Acquiring actionable information from the fire-ground is critical for effective firefighting operations.
Four types of information sources:
Community-based;
Occupant;
Building; and
Fire-fighting information.
Today, data from a variety of sources are collected independently and processed separately.
Firefighter electronic equipment – such as a breathing apparatus, thermal imagers, and radios – don’t communicate with each other.
Additionally, they don’t communicate with building sensors, firefighting tools, or community databases.
As the development of new electronic technologies continues, more data will become available for firefighting and fire protection.
This includes information on a firefighter’s and building occupant’s location, firefighter physiology, a building’s state, and fire conditions.
In other words, a vast amount of fire ground data is becoming available to improve both tactical and operational decisions.

4. Sensors
Sensors convert the characteristics of the physical environment involved in a fire emergency into raw data, thereby transforming what’s perceived into actionable information.
Leveraging emerging sensor technologies and installed systems in buildings provides opportunities for smart firefighting.
Continuing advances will provide the possibility of integrating sensors into firefighters’ personal protective equipment (PPE), as well as firefighting equipment and other apparatuses (such as land vehicles, watercraft, aircraft, satellites, and robotic systems).

5. Integration
Integrating sensor data with software analytics tools within and across architectural levels requires two things:
Standardizing network protocols, beyond those existing today, to cover wireless communications;
Standardized syntax and semantics to cover the conceptual content.
In firefighting, expert understanding of fire protection engineering, fire science, physics, and information science will be needed.
To date, the use of information modeling in those disciplines has been virtually non-existent.
As a result, the effectiveness of communication on the fireground is often problematic with the quality and quantity of information highly variable and unreliable.

6. Getting Ready
Effective management of fire events requires access to and processing of information collected prior to and after an event.
Fire-service, data-user applications require information from inspectors and enforcers, preplanning activities, training and education, and fire investigations.
While preparing for and traveling to and from fire incidents, first responders must make many decisions quickly.
This requires detailed and up-to-date information about the incident, including location, threats to resources and humans, emergency resources available, and surrounding environmental conditions.

7. Getting Ready – Cont’d
The optimal way to gather the required information is to collect data prior to the event, or after other similar events that have occurred.
Similarly, accurate assessment of the effectiveness of equipment, tactics, and resources is best evaluated when complete information about incident characteristics, resource capabilities, and location characteristics are observed, recorded, and archived.

8. The Fire Ground
At the first indication of a fire, the IC (?) uses available information and technologies as follows:
To plan an initial strategy for suppression and rescue; and
To alert the necessary community services.
That strategy includes the number and types of equipment and personnel to send in the fire ground and tactics they should execute once they arrive.
Once the equipment and personnel arrive, the personnel or the IC will set up a temporary wireless network and deploy a number of different sensor technologies to get a comprehensive and accurate assessment of the situation.
The sensors and network will continue to operate as needed throughout the current event.

9. Processing Data
This streaming, real-time information is transmitted to the IC, who uses computational tools to develop a new operational plan and issues new operational plan and issues new commands to the personnel as appropriate.
Those personnel will be equipped with a variety of sensors, personnel provide real-time data about their own conditions, their locations, the fire growth, and suppression/rescue operations.
These sensor-related data comes in three possible forms to the IC: text, audio, and video.

10. Models of Fire Ground
To update the operational plan, the IC creates and runs a series of computational models of fire growth, smoke generation, structural integrity, evacuation, suppression, ventilation, environmental conditions, air and water supply, tenability, and resource allocation.
Each of these models access repository and sensor information; integrate, process, and analyze that information; and return predictions or results for other models to use as input and for the IC to use for decision making.
As the software applications collect additional real-time data, they automatically update models, outputs, and predictions.
Others with important firefighting roles, such as police and hospitals also benefit from forecasts of the evolving incident.

11. Model-Based Predictions and Decisions
Firefighters can use the outputs and predictions from models in two ways.
In some cases, such as fire growth, the system can send outputs and predictions directly to personnel at the fire ground.
Should a model predict that the fire would spread into an area of a building that’s known to store toxic compounds, the system could integrate that model with a smoke generation model and a weather model to predict the likely impact on the surrounding community.
Then the IC could send that information directly to law enforcement agencies (to plan for a potential evacuation) and local hospitals (to plan for potential victims).
In most cases, however, model outputs and predictions drive a real-time 3D visualization of the fire ground, equipment, and personnel.
The IC uses this display to monitor the fire incident’s evolution and analyze the potential impacts of decisions and actions before issuing any commands to personnel.
(To enable progress, many standards must be developed; efforts are underway to address many of these, but much work remains.