Evacsound – Tunnel evacuation
Norphonic AS, Norway
Norphonic is a vendor of industrial acoustic systems, fire detection and evacuation equipment.
Evacsound is a distributed, soft real time system running on dedicated hardware. Its purpose is to assist public evacuation from tunnels in case of fires. The system mainly relies on delivering acoustic effects to perform guidance in low visibility situations. Additionally, the system can perform fire detection, provide directional lights, serve as a Public Address system and as call points along the tunnel.
Above: an illustration of Evacsound in a tunnel and a crossection of the devices that run the system.
The concept was conceived in 2017. Development in earnest had started in autumn 2019 and first production devices were delivered in 2021.
In this system, we use Lisp to implement both the control system and edge device functionality. While the product is built on top of embedded Linux, the application functionality is all implemented in Lisp.
Common Lisp has enabled us deliver a compact and robust codebase that is breaking new grounds in its problem domain. Planning, orchestration and error handling on a massively distributed system was made tractable by leveraging the power of Lisp.
LispWorks provides great value for targeting Linux based embedded systems. Its garbage collector is very tunable which helps to assure soft real time behaviour of the system. The support of our target architecture is comprehensive and excellent. The delivery system produces compact binaries with minimum resident memory requirements. This directly translates into lower manufacturing costs.
In addition there is a thriving community around it and first class vendor support.
Evacsound web site: evacsound.com
Norphonic web site: norphonic.com
Videos: www.youtube.com/@norphonicindustrialacousti171