Intelligent system for exploring dynamic crisis environments

The routing in complex buildings is provided by inf ormation systems. But during a crisis situation, th ese systems may collapse due to certain incidents like an explo sion, a fire or sabotage. The task of guiding peopl e in this situation has to be handled in some way. In this pa per we present a possible solution to this problem. We use a multi-agent system in a mobile ad-hoc network, without the need of any infrastructure. The main idea o f the paper is that just by exploring the damaged building, the da ta of the changing environment becomes available and the challenge is how to fuse this data from different o bservers. We focused on the way of building, sharin g and merging topological maps, using observations from individua ls present in this infrastructure-less network. Bes ides a more efficient exploration of the building, the system p resented in this paper can provide the rescue teams with additional services like finding the nearest exit. Some result s of the tests we run with our system are also pres ented.