Fire Evacuation in Metro Stations: Modeling Research on the Effects of Two Key Parameters

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.