A Low-Cost Open-Source Architecture for a Digital Signage Emergency Evacuation System for Cruise Ships, Based on IoT and LTE/4G Technologies

During a ship evacuation, many people panic as they do not know the direction that leads to the emergency muster station. Moreover, sometimes passengers get crowded in corridors or stairs, so they cannot save their lives. This paper proposes an IoT-enabled architecture for digital signage systems that directs passengers to the muster stations of a cruise ship by following the less dangerous route. Thus, crews’ and passengers’ safety risks during a ship evacuation can be low, and human health hazards may be limited. The system is based on a low-cost and open-source architecture that can also be used in a variety of fields in industrial IoT applications. The proposed modular digital signage architecture utilizes Light Emitting Diode (LED) strips that are remotely managed through a private Long-Term Evolution (LTE)/Fourth Generation (4G) cellular network. Publish–subscribe communication protocols were used for the control of the digital strips and particularly through a Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) broker who publishes/subscribes every message to specific topics of the realized IoT platform, while the overall digital signage system centralization was implemented with an appropriate dashboard supported from an open-source RESTful API.