Abstract
Metro lines have undergone a rapid development in China and a large number of metro stations have also been built. The passenger traffic volume has reached or exceeded the designed transport capacity in some big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. The safety evacuation problem within metro stations under emergency has become a worldwide concern. In this study, BuildingEXODUS was employed as the simulation platform and a metro station in Shanghai was selected for model development. Based on field survey data, the evacuation process in different fire cases was simulated, so as to evaluate the effects of two parameters (i.e., escalators and automatic ticket checkers) on evacuation performance. The research found that the use of two stopped escalators (normal metro stations have two) as fixed evacuation passages is effective and essential for safety evacuation. However, it surprisingly decreases the evacuation efficiency if using only one stopped escalator as the fixed evacuating passage. The evacuation efficiency can be improved by opening the automatic ticket checkers compared with maintaining normal status. Removing the automatic ticket checkers does not pose any difference in improving evacuation efficiency.
Highlights
With the rapid development of urbanization, large-scale metro lines have been constructed in many cities of China
Escalators and stairs were identified as the bottleneck of metro stations [23,24]
Serious incidents happening in metro stations would cause serious casualties and property losses
Summary
With the rapid development of urbanization, large-scale metro lines have been constructed in many cities of China. By 2020, the total metro mileage will reach over 8500 km in China [1]. Metro passenger flow has been rapidly increasing in many large cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, where passenger demand can even reach 130% of the original capacity [2]. Since a large number of people could potentially gather around metro stations, trampling and casualties would occur when emergencies happen. Many incidents [3,4] that occurred in metro stations have caused serious casualties and property losses. Safe metro evacuation should be considered an important research topic
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