Page 132 - Security Today, April 2018

RFID TECHNOLOGY
SURE EVACUATION WITH RFID
How using RFID can help prevent fatal accidents during evacuations By Karolina Kozlowska
The greatest nightmare of an evacuation coordinator is to finish the evacuation before all employees reach the assembly point. Such disasters can be prevented with RFID UHF technology because it gives complete knowl- edge on the location of every person that needs to be evacuated at any time of the work day.
The aim of every evacuation is unchangeable: to lead out from an endangered area all employees and, of course, it should be done in the quickest way, so staff will be safe as soon as possible. During the evacu- ation process, the coordinator should control, in real time, the location of every single person: who has already left endangered building, who has reached which assembly point (there may be a number of them and they are run by separate coordinators) and who is still in building.
However, current methods do not guarantee the optimal course of evacuation. Therefore, they do not guarantee employees the full safety in a situation of sudden danger. Change is brought by RFID UHF tech- nology, that it may be used for creating evacuation systems.
IT STARTS BEFORE A SIREN
Evacuation commences even before any danger occurs. After all, the key information for companies is how many employees are on campus at any given time and which ones should be led to an assembly point.
Naturally, the location of certain employees will change during the work day. People move between buildings, leave one and enter another. When a siren sound rips through the air, a coordinator theoretically
knows who should be moving to a safe place, but if he or she lacks the list of people and where they are, for who is he or she responsible?
Therefore, precise location of staff should be constantly monitored.
PREMIUM KNOWLEDGE
In many factories, there are still systems where a coordinator can rely on only themselves when it comes to verifying who has reached an assembly point. The coordinator either counts employees, reads their names aloud or circulates among them, ticking the names of spotted people.
It is easy to conclude that such a method is rather imprecise and its imprecision generates a risk that can have tragic consequences. One man may be omitted or someone’s name could be ticked accidentally and when evacuation is finished, somebody can simply be left behind.
This manual method has too many included risks when it comes to the lives of evacuees. Simply put, this is a zero-one solution: somebody is present or somebody is absent. If someone is absent, how do you find out where that person is?
WHY RFID?
Bearing in mind the safety of your staff, it is recommended to look closer at RFID UHF technology and what conveniences it brings for evacuation coordinators, how it increases the chances for successful evacuation and how evacuation changes itself when RFID UHF is used.
What makes it remarkable, are its features. It can automatically
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