Publication: Emergency evacuation capacity assessment of critical evacuation facilities from platform to concourse area in rail transit terminal
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Date
2021-08-01
Authors
Shaari, Norley Nadirah
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Abstract
Besides the knowledge and emergency evacuation awareness of the passengers, the design and arrangement of critical evacuation facilities in public buildings such as the rail transit terminal (RTT) are very important in ensuring the success of the entire emergency evacuation plan in the building. The evacuation facilities such as passage, staircases, turnstiles or fair gates and exit door are the facilities that evacuees have to pass through before exiting the building. The overcrowded passengers due to available escape area and quantity of evacuation facilities may result with a bottleneck during the emergency evacuation process. The aim of this research is to (1) formulate a Conceptual Framework of Emergency
Evacuation Capacity Assessment of Critical Evacuation Facilities from Platform to Concourse Area for Stesen Sentral Kuala Lumpur (SSKL), the largest RTT in Malaysia and (2) to determine the emergency evacuation capacity of critical evacuation facilities from selected rail station from platform to concourse area. The two rail stations in SSKL namely KTM Station and LRT Station were selected as the study area and five stages of research methodology (desk study, data gathering, data analysis, interpretation of findings and conclusion) were conducted to perform this research. Two major data were gathered and analysed to successfully achieve the objectives of this research are (1) configuration of building and evacuation facilities which include the quantity and available escape width of the facilities and (2) the pedestrian walking velocity of the passengers which obtained from theprevious
literature. The pedestrian walking velocity varies with the situation or conditions, walking direction either in horizontal or vertical direction, cultural or environmental of the country and individual psychology or characteristic. By using the formulated conceptual framework and mathematical computation performed by MATLAB, the assessment has shown that the average capacity of all evacuation facilities at the two selected train stations differs from each other. The emergency evacuation capacity of the staircase is the lowest compared to passage and turnstile. By considering the bottleneck effect, the total evacuation capacity of LRT Station is about 22% lower than KTM Station. It has been known that there arevery limited research studies on the assessment of emergency evacuation capacity in Malaysia; this study is therefore beneficial in helping designers, authorities, users and service management to provide a better emergency evacuation plan in the future.