Research on evacuation in the subway station in China based on the Combined Social Force Model

With the increasing number of subway stations, more and more attention has been paid to their emergency evacuation, as it plays an important part in urban emergency management. The present paper puts forward a method of crowd evacuation simulation for bioterrorism in subway station environment using the basic theory of the Social Force Model combined with the Gaussian Puff Model. A Combined Social Force Model is developed which is suitable for a real situation where there is a sudden toxic gas event. The model can also be used to demonstrate some individual behaviors in evacuation, such as competitive, grouping and herding. At last a series of experiments are conducted and the results are as follows. (1) When there is a toxic gas terroristic attack in subway stations, the influence on passengers varies according to the position that the gas source lies in and the numbers of gas sources. (2) More casualties will occur if managers do not detect the toxic gas danger and inform passengers about it. (3) The larger the wind speed is, the smaller the number of injured passengers will be. With the experiments, the number of people affected and other parameters like gas concentration can be estimated, which could support rapid and efficient emergency decisions. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.