Journal of Engineering Research

With the advancement of large-scale navigation projects in my country, the problem of emergency evacuation in tunnels has attracted much attention due to its high risk. Objective This paper constructs an emergency evacuation model based on the steering model to propose an evacuation strategy for personnel in the tunnel. Methods Taking a navigation tunnel as an example, combined with three-dimensional modeling and simulation, the rationality of the model is analyzed, the bottleneck effect of key evacuation facilities is identified, and the evacuation rules of personnel under different evacuation configurations are studied. Results The experiment shows that it takes a total of 1321 seconds (about 22 minutes) to complete the evacuation of 250 people on one side of the tunnel. In the experiment with 10 fixed evacuation entrances and the number of people increasing from 100 to 1000, the maximum evacuation time increased nonlinearly; when the number of evacuees exceeded 700, congestion at the pontoon entrance and the ladder became the main factor prolonging the evacuation time. In addition, when the fixed evacuation number was 500, increasing the number of evacuation entrances significantly improved the evacuation efficiency; when the number of entrances increased from 1 to 10, the evacuation time was greatly shortened, but its marginal effect tended to be flat after more than 12 entrances. Conclusion The study shows that the maximum evacuation time is closely related to the number of evacuees and the number of entrances. Reasonable configuration of evacuation facility entrances can effectively improve evacuation efficiency and avoid waste of resources. This study provides theoretical support for the design of emergency evacuation strategies in navigation tunnels, and puts forward suggestions for optimizing the layout of evacuation facilities.

Navigation tunnel; Emergency evacuation; Steering model; Path optimization