2018 International Conference on Computer, Control, Electrical, and Electronics Engineering (ICCCEEE)
Early Warning Firefighting System
Using Internet of Things
Rammah H. Eltom1 Enan A. Hamood2
Department of Electronics Engineering Department of Electronics Engineering
University of Gezira University of Gezira
Wad Madani, Sudan Wad Madani, Sudan
1 2
rammah.tom.36@gmail.com ananoda122@gmail.com
Abstract—Firefighting systems are the most important issue in
industrial large corporations and specifically for insurance
companies. Any delay in firefighting systems will cause huge
economical damages and human casualties. The main objective of
this study is to design an early warning firefighting system based
on internet of things by monitoring and detecting early signs of fire
by using various types of sensors: temperature, humidity, flame,
and gas. When any of these sensors' reading reaches its threshold
value, a warning alarm is generated and the system sends a
notification email and text message to the user phone and switches
off the main power system. But, if unfortunately the fire is started,
the system immediately takes the required action by using suitable
actuator (valve extinguisher) according to the sensor type. All of
these data are uploaded to the monitoring web page and also an
android application is provided for the insurance company to
monitor its clients industry or corporation. For communication
Ethernet shield cable is used for high internet connectivity to avoid
interferences. The system was tested and the result are illustrated.
Keywords— firefighting, internet of things (IoT), sensors
Introduction
The Internet of Things began to impose itself on the business
sector, known as the New Industrial Revolution and
contributing to the transformation of business practices in
different sectors. There is a significant positive impact of digital
transformation initiatives on business outcomes and functions,
such as increased revenues, improved services and faster
product launches. The adoption of internet technology can
ensure that business is sustainable and successful at this digital
stage.
Internet things "Internet Objects" aims to make everything
around us connected to the Internet to share data associated with
it, as well as the use of artificial intelligence to deal with the
huge amount of data and explore new ways to develop business
and products .For example, plant sensors that measure
temperature, gaseous emissions and pressure can be added to
the plants, and they can be shared with devices that record them
and analyze large amounts of them to observe any fluctuations
or fluctuations in the work, to take action.
978-1-5386-4123-1/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
AbdAlrahman A. Mohammed3 Abdallah A.Osman 4
Department of Electronics Engineering Department of Electronics Engineering
University of Gezira University of Gezira
Wad Madani, Sudan Wad Madani, Sudan
3 4
bangaala12@gmail.com Akode63@yahoo.com
Firefighting is as the act of attempting to prevent the spread of
and extinguish significant unwanted fires in buildings, vehicles,
woodlands, etc[1].
I. RELATED WORK
Many researchers have used the IoT to design firefighting
or monitoring system. One of the research developed a system
which will automatically monitor the industrial applications and
generate Alerts/Alarms or take intelligent Decision using
concept of IoT [2].
Other research designed a small industrial environment,
where sensor can be monitor and controlled only based on the
data received from the industrial site sensors. This data is
processed and control action placed accordingly [3]. Other
research developed a system which can monitor the sensor data
and upload it over internet and also capable of taking some
crucial decision within industries and generate and generate
Alerts/Alarms using the IoT [4]. And others designed an (IoT)
based fire alarm and monitoring system best suited for
industrial and home applications. The system is integrated with
an IoT platform. It can sense smoke, the rise in temperature,
flame etc. and send it to a far-away monitoring station through
GSM to generate needful instructions for the actuators [5].
Major of the previous studies in spite of using the same
concept of the IoT they are quite different, one of them used the
GSM, another one used WI-FI. This study differs from previous
studies by considering early monitoring and control of fire
using different communication protocol.
All of the above previous studies are designed for only
monitoring. This study is designed for early warning and can
perform safety control actions (fire fighting).
II. METHODOLOGY
Mainly the system is an embedded system designed
for monitoring and fighting the fires in the industrial
areas. The system consists of three blocks, Input, Output
and process as shown in Fig. 1.
A- The INPUT block: The system consists of two
sections(A&B), each one contains the following
 sensors (DHT11, MQ-2 & Flame sensor), here the
sensors reads data form the enivroment and
sends it to the central block.
B- The Central Processor block: It’s the brain of the
system that process data and make decisions
based on the readings and upload data to the
internet. It consists of the Arduino, Ethernet
shield, Dashboard & App.
C- The OUTPUT block: It contains the actuators
which are, relays, alarm, extinguish system
(pump and valves) & main power disconnection.
Fig. 1. Block diagram.
The designed system followed by many steps, these
steps are listed below:
1. Initialize the system (sensors): connect the system to
the power and wait for the sensors to be ready to
work because some sensors need some time to start
working and to be ready to send and read data.
2. Establish internet connection: connect the Ethernet
cable to the Ethernet shield and wait for the system
to connect. Here, the internet connection is coming
from the pc Ethernet socket, so we need to bridge
the Wi-Fi and the Ethernet together to get internet
connection.
3. Upload data to web page (Dashboard)& android app:
After the data is processed and converted to physical
quantities it will be uploaded to the cayenne my
devices dashboard and it can be monitored through
an android phone app, the dashboard and android
app will contain separated monitors for each section.
4. Check smoke, temp & Flame levels: The data is being
monitored through the web page and the app, the
system will check smoke, temp & flame levels
repeatedly for section A and B.
5. If levels > Predefined Safe value: The system will read
the levels of the temperature and humidity and gas
for each section, If the safe limit which is a known
value is exceeded, the alarm will start, a text
message will be received on a known number and
the power will be switched off, the predefined value
is defined in the code.
6. If there is flame: The previous step will fire an alarm
but it will not extinguish unless the flame sensor
reads (it means that there is fire), the power will be
switched off and the extinguish system will
extinguish the fire.
7. start pump, start alarm and switches power & send
message: if the safe limit is exceeded then there is a
fire about to break out, then the system will switch
the power from the machines, start the alarm, move
the camera into position, start the pump to
extinguish the fire or cooling the machine and sends
an SMS to a specific number.
The system design consists of two parts: part (1) is
the hardware design and part (2) is the software
design.
 Part (1): the hardware of this study is as
mentioned in the three blocks (input, process, output) is
a group of components shown in (Fig. 2. a, b, c, d):
 Input
- Mq2 gas sensor.
- DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor.
- Flame sensor module
 Process
- Arduino Uno board: The Arduino is an open-
source electronics platform based on easy-
to-use hardware and software.
- Ethernet shield & cable: to enable the
Arduino to connect to the internet.
 Output
- Relays to control high voltages.
- Alarm speaker.
- Valves and pump.
The next are Figures that shows the hardware design of A3 Section A, flame Connected to pin
the system, this was made using proteus 7.7. sensor 9
B1 Section B, Gas Connected to pin
sensor A2
B2 Section B, Temp & Connected to pin
Humidity sensor 2
B3 Section B, flame Connected to pin
sensor 8
C1 Pump relay Connected to pin
(actuator) 6
C2 Alarm speaker Connected to pin
5
C3 Power Connected to pin
disconnection relay 7
Fig. 2.a. Input block schematic

Fig. 2.b. Output block schematic

Fig. 2.d. System prototype

Fig. 2.d shows the system prototype with the

components connected together.
 Part (2): the software part consists of using the
Fig. 2.c. Process block schematic Arduino IDE (integrated development
environment) to program the Arduino board,
Table (1) illustrates the connectivity between the input and contains a text editor for writing code, a message
output blocks to the process block.
area, a text console, a toolbar with buttons for
Table (1): connectivity between the three blocks common functions and a series of menus. It
connects to the Arduino and Genuino hardware
Input & Name Arduino Pin
to upload programs and communicate with
Output blocks (Processing block)
Symbols them. Programs written using Arduino Software
A1 Section A, Gas Connected to pin (IDE) are called sketches as shown in fig.3.
sensor A1
A2 Section A, Temp & Connected to pin
Humidity sensor 3
 first moment of the start then the initialization, data
reading and uploading to the monitor, including action
and warning times, so the total processing time is
approximately equals to:

Total processing Time = Initialize Time + Sensors

response time + Warning & Action Time = 24.5766s

Table (2): Total processing time for the system

Fig. 3. Arduino IDE.

The other software here is the cayenne myDevices

dashboard, the cayenne dashboard is an IoT platform
that allows you to upload your IoT projects data and
create your web site monitor on their server for free, it
also gives you the ability to add more than one device to
your dashboard and gives the choice if you want to make
your own app and it’ll give the source code you need to
make your app[6].

Fig. 4. Shows the system monitor web page for the two
sections. The monitor displays sensors' readings of each
section. There are total of 11 channels used on the
dashboard to show the sensors' readings. It also gives
you the ability to add up to 25 channels to your screen.
Table (3): action time of the system

Fig.4 System monitoring web page

III. RESULTS & DISCUSSION:

After running the system for three times in three
different places, we found that there is a difference in
the response time due to the internet connectivity and
the place.
Table (2) shows the total processing time for the system,
the total time is the time required by the system for the
Table (3) shows the action time of the system which
includes the flame detection time, network time, pump
starting time and the power disconnecting time.
Action time = Flame detection + network response
time + pump starting time + power disconnecting time
= 4.173335 s
Here we mentioned flame detection time, because the It also gives you a data graph that shows the relation of
action to start the pump and disconnecting the power time & value of the sensor as shown in fig6.
will happen only when there is flame.

The cayenne dashboard gives us historical reports we can

access it whenever we needed, and it can be downloaded
in an excel format as shown in fig.5.

These reports show the following:

• Timestamp, example: Wed May 02

2018 18:34:28 GMT+0000 (UTC).
• Device ID: 94688210-13dc-11e8- Fig. 6. Data graph.
af7b-4f8845dd6501
• Device Type: analog or digital sensor Table (4): comparison between the previous studies systems
and this study system.
or actuator.
• Sensor ID: each sensor has its own No Comparison Previous studies This Study
ID. issues
• Sensor name: each sensor has its The The alarm starts the alarm start
own name. 1- warning after the fire before the fire
break beaks
• Data type.
Dose not Provides safety
• Unit of measurement. 2- Safety provide safety control
• Value: reading of the sensor. actions control actions actions(cuts the
power when there
We can use those reports to check overall system is a warning
performance specifically sensors (sensitivity) and sensors Control Does not Provides control
malfunction by reviewing the virtual channel data that 3- actions that provide control actions(power
the sensor is connected to or checking for a time when will take actions beside disconnection, fire
place the warning extinguishing)
the system might become unstable, so the reports are
Gas types are The fire
very important because it gives us very important data 4- Extinguish not taken into extinguishing
that can be used for further analysis. type account depends on the
type of gas
5- Reports Dose not Provides data
provide data reports, shown in
reports Fig. 5

The systems limitations:

1- There are several factors that can affect the efficiency of
the system like: The internet connectivity and the
environmental conditions.

Fig. 5. Data reports. 2- The system needs to be monitored carefully so to make

sure that all the sensors and the other parts are working well
and are in standby mode.

3- Requires equipment with special specifications.

 IV. CONCLUSIONS
In this work a proposed method based on the internet of
things to design an early firefighting system shows that
the monitor is displaying the data needed and the
reports are correct, the times it takes for the system to
start functioning is short, the system can detect fire
before it breaks out and cause damage that is why the
system is called Early Warning Firefighting System.

V. RECOMMENDATION
This paper recommends upgrading the system by using
advance and high-speed microcontroller in order to
reduce the processing time specifically when the number
of sensors are increased. And adding visual ability by
adding video streaming camera.

REFERENCES
[1] Lopez research, An Introduction to the Internet of
Things (IoT).

[2] Sangita Sanap, Prajakta Pitale and Ashwini

Deshpande, (International Journal of Advanced Research
in Computer Engineering & Technology (IJARCET)
Volume 5 Issue 2, February 2016).

[3] H. K. Merchant and D. D. Ahire, (International Journal

of Computer Applications (0975 8887). Volume 168
No.1, June 2017: Industrial Automation using IoT with
Raspberry Pi).

[4] BhosaleKiran Uttam, Galande Abhijeet Baspusaheb,

Jadhav Pappu Shivaji, Prof.Pisal.R.S,( International
Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET)
Volume: 04 Issue: 06 | June-2017 Industrial Automation
using IoT).

[5] Saumya Tiwari, Shuvabrata Bandopadhaya

(International Journal of Innovations & Advancement in
Computer Science IJIACS ISSN 2347 – 8616 Volume 6,
Issue 9 / September 2017).

[6] https://mydevices.com/