Background and Objective: Today, pervasive computing has a significant role in the daily lives of people around the world and has been able to emerge in the different applications. This type of computing that aims to hide the computing technologies at the heart of human life has created many capabilities in different aspects of everyday life from traffic and transport management to health and treatment applications. On the other hand, crisis management is one of the most challenging forms of management that any mistake in it may increase the incidence of human and material losses. The main purpose of this article is using pervasive computing to improve the process of crisis management; So that, the technologies of this type of computing help managers in better decision-making in crisis situations by providing the necessary information.

Method: In this paper, we address the key characteristics of existing activities in the life cycle of crisis management and we discuss the pervasive computing applications in order to make better decisions in critical situations. For this purpose, besides highlighting the technologies usable in this field, one of the areas of unexpected critical events in urban environments (fire) will be selected and the impact of pervasive technologies available on how to manage this crisis will be evaluated through a series of simulations. For this purpose, at first, a scenario for a pervasive fire alarm system will be developed into a hotel and then based on that, a hierarchical software architecture consists of three layers will be introduced to provide the needs of developed scenario. In the following, based on the proposed architecture, the tasks of crisis management will be mapped to pervasive technologies to the ability of simulation and measurement of the amount of potential improvement be provided after the use of pervasive fire alarm system.

Evaluation and Results: For evaluating the method, we have tried based on several specific scenarios of fire event (in a hotel) and also based on the amount and number of used pervasive technologies, measure the speed of decision-making and crisis management in order to inform its risks and save people settled in places with fire. The results show that whatever the existing technologies in pervasive computing used more, the number of people saved in the fire, as well as the control and management of crisis will improve dramatically.

Type of Paper: Research article.