Simulation Analysis of the Efficiency of Evacuation Entrances of Strip-like Metro Commercial Streets: A Case Study of Wuhan Business District Metro Station

The high-performance evacuation of commercial streets is the primary requirement for subway planning and construction. This study introduces a simulation and analysis framework to analyze the evacuation efficiency of a strip subway commercial street with the same number of entrances and exits and different entrance positions. The study modifies the entrances/exits of strip-shaped metro business street plans in a simulation approach to analyze the variation in evacuation effectiveness under varying exit layouts, as well as the effects of different escape entries on the subway commercial street. The study aims to find the optimized spatial structure of evacuation entrances of strip-like metro commercial streets. In this simulation approach, the scenarios of different combinations of entrances and exits, the floating scenario of the number of people to be evacuated, and the scenario of adjusting the proportion of elevator personnel were simulated. Through comparing the evacuation times of these simulated layout scenarios, this study finds that equidistant interval insertion-type entrance and exit arrangements of strip-shaped metro business street plans are better suited to improving evacuation efficiency. This finding can be used as a manual to improve the evacuation capacity of subway commercial streets, which will be helpful for the planning and design of subway commercial streets.