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Building emergencies, especially structure fires, are threats to the safety of both building occupants and first responders. It is difficult and dangerous for first responders to perform search and rescue in an unfamiliar environment, sometimes leading to secondary casualties. One way to reduce such hazards is to provide first responders with timely access to accurate location information. To address this challenge, the authors have developed a radio frequency based indoor localization framework, for which novel algorithms were designed for two different situations: one where an existing sensing infrastructure exists in buildings and one where an ad-hoc sensing infrastructure must be deployed. This paper presents a comparative assessment of this framework under different situations and emergency scenarios, and between simulations and field tests. The paper first presents an assessment of the framework in field tests, showing that it achieves room-level accuracies above 82.8% and 84.6% and coordinate-level accuracies above 2.29 m and 2.07 m, under the two situations, respectively. Moreover, the framework demonstrates considerable robustness in the tests, retaining a room-level accuracy of 70% or higher when the majority of sensing infrastructure is damaged. This paper then synthesizes results from both simulations and field tests, and demonstrates how the framework can be adapted to different situations and scenarios while consistently yielding satisfactory localization performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Construction is undoubtedly the most dangerous industry in Hong Kong, being responsible for 76% of all fatal accidents in the region—around twenty times more than any other industry—and involving a loss of an estimated 145,000 man-days each year through accidents on site. In this paper, a new safety assessment method, termed the 4D Interactive Safety Assessment, is described which offers an improvement. This involves individual construction workers being presented with 4D virtual risky scenarios concerning their project and a range of possible actions for selection. The method provides an analysis of results which include the assessment of the correctness or otherwise of the user''s selections to contribute to an iterative process of retraining and testing until a satisfactory level of knowledge and skill is achieved. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Management of railroad bridges constitutes a typical decision-making problem which arises from the necessity to allocate limited financial resources to maintenance and repair work. It is a multiple criteria issue consisting in the arrangement of bridges with regards to the level of structure degradation which is decisive for the safety level of their users. So far, despite a large number of suggested calculation models, mainly of probabilistic character, no method has been noticed that would allow to rank any number of bridges taking into consideration a full variety of structure and material solutions. Therefore, in order to meet the need for a more effective model, an innovative approach has been proposed using the aggregated calculation algorithm which combines the modified Extent Analysis Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (EA FAHP) method and the Dominant Analytic Hierarchy Process (DAHP) one. It is a decision-making and calculation model which allows to reflect the actual assessment processes in a more favourable manner, as well as to take into account the diversity of solutions with respect to materials and structure of bridges. An example was given of the application of the suggested method on the selected group of railroad bridges in Poland that have been in use for over 50 years. The selected structures have more diverse structures of decks and are more prone to damage than road bridges. Due to the lack of algorithms similar to the one discussed within this paper, it was verified in a limited scope with the use of two different methods by way of comparing the accordance of bridge ranking which is of importance for making a decision concerning the performance of maintenance and repair work. • there was presented a new hybrid algorithm, combining the EA FAHP and the DAHP methods, • the algorithm allows for reference arrangement of any number of bridges focusing on their technical condition assessment, • implementation of the reference model allows to analyse bridges of diverse solutions materials and structure, • an example of application of the algorithm based on the selected railroad bridges was given thus confirming its efficiency, • the algorithm was verified with the use of two different models by way of comparing the accordance of bridge ranking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]