Improving emergency evacuation capacity for subway stations based on agent-based modelling

Purpose Modern subway transportation systems need to satisfy increasing safety demands to rapidly evacuate passengers under hazardous emergency circumstances, such as fires, accidents or terrorist attacks, to reduce passenger injuries or life losses. The emergency evacuation capacity (EEC) of a subway station needs to be revised timely, in case passenger demand increases or the evacuation route changes in the future. However, traditional ways of estimating EEC, e.g. fire drills are time- and resource-consuming and are difficult to revise from time to time. The purpose of this study is to establish an intuitive modelling approach to increase the EEC of subway stations in a stepwised manner. Design/methodology/approach This study develops an approach to combine agent-based evacuation modelling and building information modelling (BIM) technology to estimate the total evacuation time of a subway station. Findings Evacuation time can be saved (33% in the studied case) from iterative improvements including stopping escalators running against the evacuation flow and modifying the geometry around escalator exits. Such iterative improvements rely on integrating agent-based modelling and BIM. Originality/value The agent-based model can provide a more realistic simulation of intelligent individual movements under emergency circumstances and provides precise feedback on locations of evacuation bottlenecks. This study also examined the effectiveness of two rounds of stepwise improvements in terms of operation or design to increase the EEC of the station.