Simulation Research On Emergency Evacuation In Subway Station Based On Anylogic

As urban areas in China keep expanding, subway has been being adopted by more and more large- and medium-scale cities because it is fast, punctual, convenient, safe and comfortable. Although subway plays an important role in passenger transport, its safety raises much concern. According to domestic and international statistics, from 1903 to 2010, there were accidents in subway systems in every country, which often caused heavy loss. It is, therefore, of significant importance to research on effective evacuation and escape technology and thus to put forward relevant reasonable evacuation strategies on the basis of the characteristics of passenger evacuation in case of subway emergency, which is particularly vital for subway station within the specified time to ensure the safety of passengers evacuation.This thesis investigates and analyzes, by means of questionnaire, basic characteristics of passengers, their familiarity with subway stations, and their reactions to subway emergencies. Moreover, system dynamics is applied to simulated modeling of crowd panicking psychology in order to further investigate behavioral features of evacuating crowd. A case study is conducted on the Zhonglou Station of Xi'an subway system, and the simulation software of Anylogic is applied to model the situation of passenger evacuation from subway stations, involving simulation studies on emergency evacuation from subway station in saturated condition.In the comparison of different data resulting from simulated evacuations with changed passenger structure, breadth of staircase, and number of ticket gates, there appear some significant findings about subway emergency evacuation. First, a slight change in evacuation rate has marginal impact on the overall process of evacuation, and with other conditions unchanged, increase in the breadth of staircase reduces evacuation time, but such a reduction does not continue infinitely: when ticket gates do not allow the passage of all the passengers who have passed staircases, evacuation time increases. Second, when the breadth of staircase increases further, the number of passengers passing the staircase per time unit reaches a dynamic balance with the amount of passengers who pass the ticket gates, and in this situation, the overall evacuation time tends to be stable. Third, increasing ticket gates while other conditions remain unchanged, can reduce the overall evacuation time, indicating that increasing ticket gates improves evacuation efficiency to some extent. Last but not least, as the number of ticket gates continues to increase, while no change happens to the numbers of passengers who have pass staircases and arrived at ticket gates, if the passing capacity of the ticket gates significantly surpasses the number of evacuating people, the overall evacuation time gradually become stable, so a waste of resource may result from simply increasing ticket gates.It is therefore the matching of the breadth of staircase with the number of ticket gates that plays the determining and restricting role in passenger evacuation, so only increasing ticket gates or widening staircase cannot be considered reasonable. To evacuate passengers in a more effective manner, a subway station need to be designed and planned as a whole, and the optimal collaboration of staircase and ticket gates has to be established.