REFIRE

Refire is a research project running for two years (2012-2013), co-funded by the European Commission, Directorate-General Home Affairs in the framework of the call “CIPS Action Grants 2010”.

The project aims to the adoption of effective location and communication services for indoor and deep-indoor emergencies and define a set of standards and protocols able to enable daily use of interoperable systems.

Whatever the origin of an emergency, a response fast and effective enough can drastically change the resulting losses. During the first phases of an emergency, when the first few responders have to assume more risks having the opportunity to block the escalation of the incident into a higher scale emergency, and after on, when the increasing number of responders from different organisations boost the confusion and the complexity of the coordination tasks, what you really need is to know where your operators are and to communicate with them, reliably, anywhere, anytime.

Refire builds on the results of previous R&D projects and available industrial solutions to offer a solution ready to for the market, thus paving the way for a day-to-day use of effective location and communication services for indoor and deep-indoor emergencies. In a nutshell, the REFIRE project is aimed at tailoring existing capabilities to a specific package and at integrating them in a reference implementation.

Such reference implementation will be developed around a non-proprietary standard for data and equipment interfaces, so that future interoperability of devices manufactured by any vendors across Europe is ensured.

The consortium is completed by technical experts from different European countries. Here the list of partners:

  • IES Solutions (Italy)
  • Ministero dell’Interno – Dipartimento dei Vigili del Fuoco, del Soccorso Pubblico e della Difesa Civile (Italy)
  • Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma (Italy)
  • BECAR Srl – Gruppo Beghelli (Italy)
  • Indicod-Ecr Servizi (Italy)
  • RADIOLABS – Consorzio Università Industria – Laboratori di Radiocomunicazioni (Italy)

Update:

The project has come to a successful conclusion with the demonstration of the simple ed affordable system developed for the indoor location of rescuers.
Based on a combination of inertial platforms and RFID technology, the project (under the coordination of IES Solutions) proved the feasibility of a system able to locate a rescuer inside a building with the accuracy of a few meters, without any drift or performance degradation caused by walked distance and time.
This video shows the system performances as perceived by the rescue operations co-ordinator.
This scientific paper reports on the system features and technical background.
On 18th Dec 2013, a final workshop took place in Roma at the CAMPUS Bio-medico University; results and potentials were presented and discussed.