Simulation on fire emergency evacuation in special subway station based on Pathfinder

Abstract

As a kind of large volume underground vehicles, the subway greatly relieves the traffic pressure of the city. However, the main defect is a closed space can easily lead to high casualty once there is a fire. In this paper, Pathfinder software was utilized to simulate the evacuation in special subway station. The evacuation in dissimilar status was analyzed by setting up the fire scenario and changing the flow rate in the station. The results showed that the pressure of evacuation is mainly at stairway entrance and the width of exit has little effect on relieving the evacuation pressure. Besides, the number of the people in platform need to be restricted to 500 when the train is full; when the number of passengers in the train is 1542, that of people on the platform has to be limited to 480; when the number of passengers in the train is 1224, no more than 800 people on the platform need to be controlled.

Keywords

• Pathfinder
• Subway
• Simulation
• Fire emergency evacuation
• Safety engineering