Special Session on Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks for Hazardous Areas

Industrial hazards like mishaps in coal mines, e.g., fire from organic gases and underground water intrusion, toxic gas leakage in large-scale petrochemical industries, natural disaster, e.g., hurricane, storms destroying high tension voltage line resulting power fluctuation cause severe damage to industry, environment as well as human life. However, with the existing approaches with hand-held devices with static cable-connected sensor nodes and wireless sensor nodes in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs), several research works focus on the estimation hazardous area boundary.

However, an accurate boundary is less likely to be detected due to the nature, e.g., invisibility, fast movement, and changing shape of toxic gases and sudden occurrence of industrial hazards. In addition, reporting only hazardous area is not safe enough to design the evacuation route for humans. It is also necessary to design pre- and post-disaster management in industrial applications. As a first step towards this goal, it is an important issue to provide real-time monitoring as well as develop new and effective methods for identifying safe area with the IWSNs in real-time when industrial hazards happens in the industrial plants.