Ether­net com­mu­ni­ca­ti­on for de­tec­tion of emer­gen­cy lo­ca­ti­ons and dy­na­mic eva­cua­ti­on in un­der­ground in­fra­struc­tu­res

Dipl.-Ing. Chris­toph Mül­ler, Prof. Dr. Iuliu Sze­ke­ly, An­dre­as Noack

OPTIM 2010 - 12th In­ter­na­tio­nal Con­fe­rence on Op­ti­miza­t­i­on of Elec­tri­cal and Elec­tro­nic Equip­ment


Ab­stract

Un­der­ground in­fra­struc­tu­res like tun­nels and es­pe­ci­al­ly wide spread un­der­ground mines today are equip­ped with Ether­net based com­mu­ni­ca­ti­on sys­tems. These net­works are used for the uni­ver­sal data, voice and video com­mu­ni­ca­ti­on. As these net­works stretch along the major tun­nels and in in­crea­sing scale also into the pro­duc­tion areas, a ne­ar­ly full co­ver­a­ge can be re­ached. In this case, net­work ca­b­ling will be in­stal­led in ne­ar­ly all tun­nels. For wire­less co­ver­a­ge, stan­dard IEEE 802.​11 WLAN ac­cesspoints are being used. In order to pro­vi­de a ma­xi­mum avail­a­bi­li­ty and re­lia­bi­li­ty, the ac­tive com­po­n­ents are equip­ped with bat­te­ry back­up power sup­p­lies and the net­work in­fra­struc­tu­re is set up in a red­un­dant way using ring or me­s­hed to­po­lo­gies. This pro­vi­des a much hig­her avail­a­bi­li­ty and red­un­dancy com­pa­red to tra­di­tio­nal phone sys­tems or de­di­ca­ted data links using a con­ven­tio­nal star to­po­lo­gy. Di­stri­bu­ted com­pu­ting in­tel­li­gence that is in­stal­led on ac­tive net­work nodes throug­hout the whole net­work, ad­di­tio­nal­ly sup­por­ted by a cen­tral ser­ver sys­tem, crea­tes the basis for new mine sa­fe­ty func­tions in­tro­du­ced in this paper. These new sa­fe­ty func­tions cover the de­tec­tion of po­ten­ti­al emer­gen­cies, using the sta­tus of the net­work as a “sen­sor”, as well as dy­na­mi­cal­ly gui­ding peop­le to safe exits or re­s­cue shel­ters in case of an emer­gen­cy. Fur­ther­mo­re, these func­tions are of im­portant be­ne­fit for im­pro­ving the ef­fi­ci­en­cy of se­arch and re­s­cue ope­ra­ti­ons fol­lowing a major in­ci­dent or ac­ci­dent under ground.

[Con­fe­rence Link]

Tags: emer­gen­cy, ether­net, eva­cua­ti­on, mi­ning