Research on Pedestrian Evacuation Simulation in Road Tunnel Fire

The number and scale of road tunnels are increasing over years. Road tunnels are semi-closed, which makes it difficult to rescue people when accidents happen, especially fire disaster that produces thick smoke to block the view and toxic gas to threaten people, which brings a challenge to tunnel traffic emergency management. To solve the problems above, a method blends fire dynamics simulation and pedestrian traffic simulation, combining fire smoke numerical simulation and social force model in pedestrian traffic by concentrating on pedestrian speed, which was applied to people evacuation in road tunnel space. A road tunnel in Guangdong, China, was selected as a research case; simulation scenario was divided by tunnel structure (the location of cross passage). The worst work condition of pedestrian evacuation affected by fire smoke was studied. Finally, the impact of response time on evacuation time was analyzed.