Emergency Evacuation - Automatic Roll Call & Head Count.

The larger the organisation the bigger the problem.

The Cryptag Census product has been employed by one leading government organisation to overcome the vagaries of mustering staff manually. The Census product subliminally registers staff, visitors and contractors movements as they move from building to building on the 98 acre site.

The full description of the site and solution is provided in the following applications note drafted by the integrator and installer Evolution Ltd. (www.evolutionsecurity.com) of High Wycombe.

The project illustrates perfectly one of the many uses to which Cryptag Census can be applied.

Abbey Wood is a modern office complex that was built specifically for the MoD Defence Procurement and Warship Support Agencies and covers 98 acres of land near to BAe Filton on the outskirts of Bristol. The DPA is an executive agency of the Ministry of Defence and its task is to procure the equipment that ensures the UK Armed Forces remain the best in the World. With an annual budget of £6 billion the DPA plays a crucial role in British industry. The DPA currently manages around 700 defence related projects including Typhoon, Skynet and Future Carrier.

This facility is the home for approximately 6000 Military and Civilian personnel, and in light of recent terrorist events, the Facility Management Group issued a new Health & Safety statement to cover emergency situations.

The Security & Facility Managers were tasked to provide attending Emergency Services a detailed report on the quantity and names of personnel believed to be trapped or left behind in the buildings after an emergency evacuation.

The traditional way to produce an emergency roll call report is to get a list of personnel normally in the building under evacuation and take this list to the Fire Assembly Point (FAP) to laboriously check against those present and ask everyone to account for those not present due to annual leave, sickness, off-site or any other reason. This list would not account for visitors and it would be the responsibility of everyone to ensure their visitors are accounted for and added into the report. Bearing in mind that the site has many hundreds of visitors per day, this task is virtually impossible.
In order for this new requirement to be met, the DPA tendered for a suitable system to monitor the movements of all staff and visitors on site, 24 hours a day, at all entry and exit points to all buildings and also the site's pedestrian and vehicle entry/exit gates.

Safety Registration System
Evolution won the tender to design, install and maintain this system, the first Safety Registration System (SRS) of its type in the world. This system is able to monitor the movement of personnel on and off the site and also determine which building they are in by the use of long-range hands free RFID tags and readers.

The tags are detected and reported via antennae connected to Census door controllers at every single entry/exit location on all buildings and areas across the site. The antenna types vary considerably to cope with the sites varied access points. For example, standard Fire Exit doors may have an internal door/ ground loop and an external buried ground loop. Buried loops are used to prevent damage by machinery such as lawn mowers and window cleaning platforms etc. Each door has at least two antennae to determine the direction of the person.

Vehicle and pedestrian access points are monitored by buried loops cut into the tarmac. The buildings main entrances have overt but aesthetically pleasing stanchion loops fitted to ensure best reading performance and are made of stainless steel to overcome affects from the salty atmosphere in and around the Bristol area.   In addition to the Cliptags, Abbey Wood have also chosen to use the Census Asset tags. These devices (shown right) are available in two styles designed for metal and non-metallic mounting. Typical use is for any high value or hard to locate asset. Used in conjunction with Cliptags, it is possible to find out who last moved the item through a Census managed door.

With over 250 doors, fire exits, car park gates, and muster points monitored using over 600 antennae, the project was planned for installation over an 18-month period and five phases. All the doors, fire exits or car park entry/exit points are free access (no locking devices are used) and as no mechanical or user feedback is available, the Census system has been designed to monitor itself for any potential failure. Every antenna (loop) has an adjacent Performance Test Tag (PTT1) that continually transmits/receives data to the loop and its' controller, which will inform the management system of any fault.

The Census door controllers report tag information to the C-CURE800 Security Management System via network connected iSTAR controllers.

C-CURE800 Server software runs on a dual PC server system managed by Legato software in order to maximise the systems availability. Servers are located at remote locations of the site and are connected by fibre optic links for disk mirroring. Failure of one PC server will automatically transfer control to the other server. C-CURE800 client terminals are connected to the Server to provide the interface to the system. Functions include adding & deleting of personnel from the database, monitoring of the systems activity and producing the Roll Call reports, the prime reason for installing the system. During an emergency situation, on-site Manned Guarding Services evacuate the relevant buildings and personnel are directed towards marshalled Fire Assembly Points. The process of leaving the building will log personnel out of that area and move them into another area. Emergency Roll Call reports can be run from any client terminal take just a few seconds to be displayed and be printed.

In those instances where the personnel Cliptag cannot be read, for example, when a door or building has been damaged, the Roll Call report could be incorrect. To overcome this, personnel are requested to present their tag to the nearest Muster reader to log them out of the building and into a safe area

Visitors & Sisys Visitor Management System

As the site attracts many hundreds of visitors every day, it was essential that the C-CURE800 system be interfaced with the Sisys Visitor Management System. The Sisys system was adapted to export new visitor data and the C-CURE800 was programmed to import the data. This has resulted in a process that ensures a visitor is enrolled in both systems and is issued an SRS tag within a 30 second period.

Visitors are classified as 'escorted' and 'un-escorted' and their movements are monitored as soon as they leave the registration area. At the end of their visit, the visitors' tag is placed into one of the capture readers and the visitor is then automatically logged off site within the SRS system. Ending the visit on the Sisys system will delete the visitor from the C-CURE800 database allowing the tag to be re-used for the next visitor.