Some of the key components developed so far in the RUNES project were demonstrated on the 7th and 8th of June 2006 in Budapest during the 5th project meeting.
The demonstrator showed how the recently implemented software and hardware modules can be integrated in the context of the road tunnel fire scenario and the corresponding animated movie. The successful demonstration was attended by external reviewers and the European Commission's project officer. This use case will also feed into the larger demonstrator later in the project.
The story
At the beginning traffic is flowing normally in the road tunnel. Tunnel fires can be detected by the wired system that is part of the tunnel infrastructure. The fire sensors do, however, have the capability to operate wirelessly if required. An accident within the road tunnel has resulted in a fire. The fire is detected and is reported back to the Tunnel Control Room. The emergency services are summoned manually by Tunnel Control Room personnel. As a result of the fire the wired infrastructure is damaged and the link is lost between fire detection nodes. Using wireless communication, information from the fire detection nodes is still delivered to the Tunnel Control Room seamlessly. The first response team arrive from the fire brigade. Four firemen are sent into the tunnel on foot. They each have a sensor for environmental temperature as part of their equipment and also carry a gateway node which can be used to set up a network. A network is set up by the Emergency Command which incorporates data from the temperature sensors attached to the firemen and the fire detectors within the tunnel. As the firemen move towards the fire the sensors reporting periodic data on external temperatures detect a rise in temperature and respond by increasing the frequency of reporting so that the Emergency Control can assess the danger to the firefighters. The fire becomes more severe. A node is lost. This may be a fire detection sensor destroyed by the intense heat or a fireman whose sensor is damaged or who has occasion to withdraw from the scene of the fire. The gateway node used by the Tunnel Control Room fails. The system reconfigures to use data from the Emergency Control network.
Architecture and hardware components
The system's architecture (Fig. 1) employs a number of fixed (pink colour) and mobile (green colour) nodes to demonstrate the autoconfiguration and reconfiguration functionality.
|
|
Fig. 1 The architecture of the road tunnel fire demonstrator in Budapest.
|
The demonstrator
Given the need for portability and the catastrophic consequences of real fire, the demonstrator used light sensors in place of temperature sensors. By varying the light levels it is possible to indicate the progress of fire or the proximity of a sensor to fire. If light reaches a certain level, the sensor will shut itself down as having been consumed by fire. If the power is disconnected from a node, or a network cable pulled out, then the system copes without manual intervention. Any preconfiguration is limited to those nodes that would in reality be preconfigured.
In order to visualise the functionality of the system, a simple GUI running on a PC was created, which shows, for example, the state of network connections, the middleware components loaded, etc. Traffic was also added onto the network to simulate the operating mode of the tunnel.
|
|
Fig. 2 The hardware of the road tunnel fire demonstrator.
|
In summary, the demonstrations in Budapest showed how:
- the motes were able to configure themselves
automatically when first added to the infrastructure;
- the tunnel control was able to monitor the overall
tunnel infrastructure, ie. observe when motes were added, their operating condition became
critical or failed;
- in case the main gateway (GW1) fails, the system was able
to fail-over and reconfigure itself by using the second (connectBlue) gateway and continue
operating seamlessly (with motes continuing to report measurement data to the
tunnel control PC);
- the firefighters were able to deploy dynamically new
components onto the motes to allow them to receive and share data.
The standard measurement notification system/component was replaced by
firefighters with a new notification component - demostrating not just
dynamic deployment of components but also dynamic re-binding between
components (ie. measurements send using the newly deployed component instead of the old one).
- the firefighters were also able to disseminate data from sensors and
coordinate among themselves by relying on a reconfigurable
communication infrastructure supporting mobility and
nodes joining or disappearing.
A more advanced demonstration to show system autoconfiguration, reconfiguration, and resilience to failure as well as heterogeneous operation will take place during 21-23 Nov. 2006 as part of the
IST Exhibition in Helsinki.
