London’s King’s Cross St. Pancras underground station has been the unfortunate location of two major incidents within the last twenty years. A fire in November 1987 and the terrorist bombings in July 2005 both resulted in the loss of lives, and the injury of many people. The implementation of measures to mitigate or neutralise the effect of any future incidents at this site is unrealistic. The adoption of preparedness measures is crucial for the emergency services to limit the loss of life and property, and to improve the response phase of an incident. The King’s Cross underground station is currently being redeveloped, partly to mitigate the remaining few operational and safety issues raised after the 1987 fire, and also to allow for the future increases in passenger volume (e.g. 2012 Olympics). However, despite these modifications and improvements, both the surrounding built environment and the station will necessarily remain complex structures. The emergency services have several duties placed upon themselves in the event of a major incident, and a computer based simulation tool capable of examining the effects of different incident assumptions or contingencies may greatly benefit an incident planner.

The aim of this research is to design and implement a prototype pedestrian evacuation model in order to facilitate the assessment of local National Health Service (NHS) resources in the event of an incident within or adjacent to King’s Cross Underground station. In particular, Camden PCT are interested in the appraisal of pedestrian egress from the station in order to determine the allocation and positioning of key emergency functions and facilities e.g. ambulance loading point(s), casualty clearing station(s) to which the injured can be taken, etc.

Computer simulation offers an efficient means of modelling the interaction of a large number of autonomous entities, especially when the evaluation of different contingencies is required. At present, there are no fewer than thirty three proprietary and non-proprietary computer simulation applications / models available to evaluate pedestrian egress from buildings. An agent-based pedestrian evacuation model has been developed for this study using the Repast (Java) toolkit, which was identified as a viable alternative to using an existing pedestrian evacuation application / model for several reasons. Off-the-shelf proprietary pedestrian evacuation models often provide limited explanation of their inner workings. Many are essentially black box, and accompanying literature often provides little or no evidence to support the validity of the results they produce. Additionally, accessibility to some proprietary pedestrian evacuation models is limited to consultancy with the software developer. In such instances, the party who has commissioned the research invariably has limited understanding of the modelling techniques used, and are limited to the results and analysis published in the final report. They are unable to explore results further, or revisit a model of a scenario for additional exploration at a later date. Neither of these options is particularly desirable to the research sponsor.

In due course the methodology and results derived from this study will be published on this website.