Pedestrian Evacuation Time Model for Urban Metro Hubs Based on Multiple Video Sequences Data

Evacuation time is a significant safety coefficient for Urban Metro Hubs (UMHs). Usually, a reasonable model for evacuation time will effectively promote the safety for pedestrian when emergency incidents occur in UMHs. In this paper, we propose a pedestrian evacuation time model for UMHs to improve the accuracy and reliability of its evacuation time. Firstly, we design an experiment survey based on the multiple video sequences to analyze the characteristics of pedestrian flow. Then, we decompose the evacuation process on the basis of the parameters, which involve the evacuation characteristics, the speed-density variation law, the pedestrian drop-off time, the platform evacuation time, and the channel evacuation time. Finally, we take the Bei Da-jie metro hub in Xi’an as an example, and verify the feasibility of the proposed pedestrian evacuation time model. The results show that the relative error for the evacuation time between the experiment result and the actual data is only 1.90%, where the experiment time is 169.87 s and the actual time is 166.64 s. Moreover, the proposed model strictly follows the Code for Design of Metro (GB 50157-003) and hence it can provide a good theoretical guidance for innovating the evacuation efficiency and the design reasonability of UMHs.