Today's developments on commercial and residential buildings have seen tremendous changes. Compared to a decade ago, developments today have seen exponential growth in size, operation, complexity and occupancy.
Along with these developments, the building safety standards today have seen a shift from standalone fire-alarm systems to total building safety intelligence (BSI).
BSI addresses the need for buildings to provide for occupants' safety, as well as the management of any emergency situation where building occupants may be endangered. BSI covers a wide range of possibilities for building safety management. Systems catering to it should have capabilities to operate automatically with intelligence. Automated operation minimises the need for human intervention thus reducing the risk of human errors and ensuring prompt and proper response to hazardous situations.
One of the key criteria of BSI implementation is the integration of the building services systems. These systems usually referred to as extra low voltage systems consist of CCTV systems, fire alarm panels, card access systems and public address systems among others. By and large the public address system has a huge role to play in integrating all the systems together. While most of the systems are designed for monitoring situations, only the public address system is capable of providing meaningful feedback and information to the building occupants through its audio broadcasting capabilities.
AEX System has developed products with these capabilities in mind. The early evacuation system (EES) Digital Matrix developed by the company caters for human life safety and physical assets safety.
Human life safety
The EES Digital Matrix PA system is capable of automatically managing an evacuation procedure by providing instructions to occupants on what to do and where to go depending on their location. By doing so, it will ensure the optimisation of all fire escapes' capacity and avoid congestion or crowding of fire escapes. In order to provide these, the fire alarm panel is integrated to the system. This integration enables the system to determine which floors or area is having an emergency and automatically conducts the evacuation process.
Physical assets safety
The EES Digital Matrix PA system is also designed to integrate with surveillance and monitoring systems in a bid to improve the physical assets safety of any building. An example of such a system is the integration with 'smart' CCTV capable of identifying intrusions in an area. Once detected the EES Digital Matrix PA system can be triggered to play a warning message to the area that has been breached and simultaneously broadcast messages to the security guard's room and general areas informing them of the intrusion.
The main objective of the system is to provide a crime deterrent solution as opposed to the conventional post-mortem analysis systems. Where traditional CCTV systems have focus on recording crimes being committed, with only an average stolen goods recovery rate of 25% for most countries, the industry has seen tremendous pressure to implement crime deterrent solutions such as BSI.
All these voice instructions greatly reduce the response time of occupants, whether a call to evacuate or a call to investigate an area of a building. It is these improved response times and that are essential in contributing to a safer environment for building occupants. In summary some of the key advantages of BSI to any building are:
* Improves building safety rating.
* Increases value of the building.
* Automated and intelligent safety procedures.
* Reduces damage to property.
* Increase life-saving opportunities.
© Technews Publishing (Pty) Ltd. | All Rights Reserved.
printer friendly version