Modeling and safety strategy of passenger evacuation in a metro station in China

The construction of metro in China is in a period of an unprecedented development in recent years, and the passengers are in high density within the metro during the operation time, the problem of occupant safety in emergencies has attracted more and more attentions. During the design and operation stages, modeling of the metro station evacuation capacity by using the computational models is an effective measure for guaranteeing the metro evacuation safety in the future. In this article, the safety strategy of evacuation in metro stations is first investigated and established, which involves the occupants needed to be evacuated, the evacuation route, and the safety zone. Then, an engineering calculation method for the metro station evacuation time is proposed. Based on the experimental data, simulation of evacuation process in different fire cases is conducted by using an agent-based model, so as to study the features of occupant evacuation behavior, the evacuation time, the passage flow rate, and the strategy of using the escalator as evacuation passage. These conclusions will be helpful for guiding the safe evacuation design of metros in China. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.