Study on an emergency evacuation model considering information transfer and rerouting: Taking a simplified H-shape metro station hall as an example

Metro has already become one of the main transportation methods in big cities across the world. With the development of metro systems, lots of associated safety issues (e.g., fire accidents and terrorism attacks) have occurred in the past decades. Under such circumstances, studies on the safety evacuation of the metro station hall are very necessary. Due to high human-density, fluent evacuation is important in the metro station hall in emergencies. However, metro station hall evacuation is a complex process, filling with humans of different behavior biases. Selection of evacuation direction usually is influenced by accessing information and human decision-making inevitably. Therefore, the paper proposed an evacuation model based on information transfer and rerouting, mainly concentrating on panic propagation, human decision process and human interaction, in order to examine the effects of these factors on evacuation. Results show that emergency information transmission is crucial in accelerating evacuation since stronger information intensity brought from panic propagation improves the evacuation efficiency. The guidance of human flow during evacuation can unify evacuation behavior and the diversion of the crowd at the exits can make full use of the evacuation capacity of exits. Before the timestamp of 39, which corresponds to the time at which the people reach the exit, the human crowd walking in the corridor generally evacuate faster in the unified direction under the control of the herd mentality model. After that, masses gathered at the exit, and the social force model displays a better evacuation effect because of crowd diversion. Spontaneous rerouting may aggravate the evacuation chaos, while scientific evacuation route guidance and command is more reasonable and reliable. These conclusions will guide the process in making evacuation plans for the metro station hall and provide a new perspective to examine evacuation by considering human factors that are closer to the real situation.