Fire modeling of passengers rolling stock evacuation

Management of evacuation as part of fire safety management, is mandatory in railway transport. Thus, in any safety assessment of a railway transport, the evacuation of people to a safe refuge in case of fire must be ensured within a short time. For this assessment, fire drills are undertaken. However, conducting fire drills necessitates a certain amount of time and cost. Furthermore, fire drills may not be realistic in the worst-case scenario. For these reasons, Evacuation modelling technology can be a very useful tool for emergency evacuation planning which allows realizing a lot of different simulations and which is less expensive than real scale test. In this paper, the Moroccan atlas train, is used as case study and the selected model for simulations is Pyrosim. Five scenarios were created to better analyze the impact of various incoming data (modification of the architecture, the localization of the fire and the running time) on passenger evacuation performances. Simulation runs were executed and evacuation time was determined. In the simulations, evacuation time (from ignition to the moment when the coach is empty) of 32 passengers from a train to a platform was average 128s. Between stations, the simulations of 32 escaping passengers gave an average RSET of 311s. This study provides a further understanding of passengers rolling stock evacuation by evaluating the factors that affect evacuation time and demonstrate that numerical simulations of evacuation can be used to substitute the full-scale test required by regulation.