Agent-based evacuation simulation from subway train and platform

Abstract

With many people using subways at the same time, subway stations must be appropriately designed to allow people to move smoothly and safely during daily operation and emergency evacuation. The present study carries out an agent-based modeling (ABM) of people from trains and platforms in a typical subway station in normal and evacuation scenarios. Developed based on the NetLogo platform, the proposed model enables defining normal and emergency scenarios with realistic considerations of some critical parameters, including number of trains; number of passengers, stairs, ticket gates, exits; passenger destination choices; and possible delaying of exiting the train and station. Comparative studies of normal and emergency situations are conducted on a prototype subway station. Parametric investigations show different impacts of some key parameters on evacuation time and delay and provide some valuable insights for understanding the potential causes of delay of evacuations and possible improvements of the subway station design in terms of emergency response. By adopting site- and event-specific parameters of the station and emergency event, future customized analyses can be conducted based on the proposed model to help design and implement more optimized and tailored emergency response plans and srategies.

Keywords:

• Agent-based simulation
• evacuation
• subway
• emergency
• train
• platform

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of this research by the Center for Risk-based Community Resilience sponsored by National Institute of Standards and Technology under Grant 70NANB15H044. The second author would like to acknowledge the funding support from CAPES of Brazil for the visit study at Colorado State University. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this material are those of the investigators and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.