Quantitative Risk Assessment of Road Tunnel Fire Safety: Improved Evacuation Simulation Model
Publication: ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part A: Civil Engineering
Volume 6, Issue 1
Abstract
With a view to enhance road network’s safety, it is crucial to focus primarily on its critical infrastructures, one part of which is tunnels. Fire safety of tunnels concerned intensely the public opinion after the disastrous trans-Alpine accidents in Europe in the late 1990s. Therefore, risk assessment was officially introduced for ensuring the tunnels’ level of safety. Bearing in mind that trapped-users’ performance can strongly determine a tunnel’s level of safety, this paper proposes an evacuation simulation model for increasing the efficiency of quantitative risk assessment. The model aims at acting as an add-in to the traditional computational fluid dynamics models by linking their results with trapped-users’ evacuation. The model structure is twofold. Initially, through estimating potential losses among trapped-users, the effectiveness of important parameters for the safety of the tunnel system is measured. Subsequently, if needed, the performance of additional to standard safety measures is examined. The model aids safety analysts in making better-informed decisions regarding a tunnel’s level of safety. An application example is presented to illustrate the utilization of the model.
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Acknowledgments
We express our gratitude to the editor and the two anonymous reviewers for both their time and the valuable comments provided that improved significantly our manuscript.
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ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part A: Civil Engineering
Volume 6 • Issue 1 • March 2020
Copyright
©2019 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Oct 24, 2018
Accepted: May 13, 2019
Published online: Oct 31, 2019
Published in print: Mar 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Mar 31, 2020
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