Abstract:

The improvement of the resilience of transportation hubs is crucial to cope with the pressure brought by a sudden large passenger flow on the transportation system. Based on the layout of the internal facilities of transportation hubs, the potential passenger evacuation paths are abstracted as a network diagram comprising nodes and links. From the perspective of changing the passenger evacuation paths, an optimization model is proposed herein for sudden large passenger flow evacuation while opening the emergency channels. The emergency channels that are normally closed can be opened for evacuation when there is a sudden large passenger flow. The passenger flow between each origin and destination and the potential passenger evacuation paths are pregiven. A passenger evacuation optimization model is presented to minimize the generalized cost including the passenger evacuation time and the cost of opening the emergency channels. The chaotic ant colony algorithm is designed to solve the model and obtain the optimal passenger evacuation scheme. Finally, Beijing South Railway Station is taken as a case study to verify the model and algorithm. Results show that in case of a sudden large passenger flow, opening emergency channels with appropriate location and number can effectively shorten the evacuation time of passengers. The results obtained in this paper provide a theoretical support for improving the resilience of urban transportation hubs from the perspective of their internal facility planning and layout and the optimization of passenger evacuation.

Key words: urban traffic, sudden large passenger flow, resilient transportation hub, emergency channel, chaotic ant colony algorithm