Innovative Indoor Positioning Allowing for Safe Infrastructure

Knowing the exact locations of the people staying in a building at any time constitutes crucial information during an industrial incident or a natural hazard. The computer aided disaster management system developed at Graz University of Technology offers indoor positioning capabilities, without the burden of having to rely on expensive and inflexible stationary infrastructure installed in the building. Furthermore, deploying inertial measurement units and utilising characteristic building information stored on small-scale mobile devices, provides seamless and autonomous indoor localisation. This paper gives an overview of the developed system, analyses positioning technologies already existing and describes the innovative map matching techniques designed to conduct the combination of time-dependent and time-independent information during deployment. Experimental results show the performance of the system.