Modeling and analysis of subway fire emergency response: An empirical study

Modeling and analysis of a subway fire emergency response processes are extremely important in metro operation. In this study, a Petri net based approach is proposed to model and analyze the time and resource issues of subway fire emergency response processes. More specifically, the formal specification of subway fire emergency response process is first defined and a real subway fire response process is given to validate our methodologies. Next, resource conflict detection methods along with corresponding algorithms are proposed to detect potential resource conflicts. In addition, a priority criterion which constitutes of key-task priority strategy and waiting-short priority strategy is proposed to resolve the detected resource conflicts and optimize the whole process execution time. By experiment comparison, it is proved that our resolution strategies could effectively resolve resource conflicts as well as achieving high time performance. The proposed approach can be effectively used to simulate and train an emergency response plan to detect potential conflicts in time, sequence, and resources, before its real application. In this way, the reliability and validity of emergency response plan can be improved greatly.