Investigation of the capacity of train stations in case of a large-scale emergency evacuation

Abstract

Nature and human-made hazards, like hurricanes, inundations, terroristic attacks or incidents in nuclear power plants, make it necessary to evacuate large urban areas in a short time. So far, the consideration of railway transportation is rarely part of the evacuation strategies. One of the reasons is the unknown capacity of this infrastructure. In the case of hurricanes Katrina and Rita (USA) the evacuation was accomplished with private vehicles and buses. In Germany, especially in the conurbation of Nordrhein-Westfalen, where many roads are overloaded during the daily rush hours, it will not be possible to use only road dependent vehicles like private cars or busses to evacuate a large number of people into save areas. After the nuclear power plant disaster of Fukushima, the working group ‘AG Fukushima’ was founded, which recommends the use of trains for large-scale emergency evacuations. However, it is not clear if the capacity of train stations is enough to handle these large evacuations in time. Hence, this work deals with the question of how the capacity of train stations can be quantified and optimised for this application. In order to estimate the capacity of train stations we use and further develop the Jülich Pedestrian Simulator (JuPedSim), a software for pedestrian dynamics simulations. Therefore, a model of a train station is built in JuPedSim and several parameters like the inflow and outflow of the pedestrians are examined, to find the best routing strategy and organisational actions inside the station. The focus of this contribution lies in the identification of critical bottlenecks. An estimation of which parameters are influencing congestion at these bottlenecks is presented. Additionally, organisational strategies are outlined, which can prevent congestion and increase the capacity of a train station.