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Purpose When a railway emergency occurs, it often leads to unexpected consequences, especially for trains of higher speed and larger passenger flow. Therefore, the railway emergency plan, a pre-established plan to deal with emergencies, plays an important role in reducing injuries and losses. However, the existing railway emergency plans remain as plain-text documents, requiring lots of manual work to capture the important regulations. This paper aims to propose a visualized, formal and digital railway emergency plan modeling method based on hierarchical timed Petri net (HTPN), which is also of better interpretability. Design/methodology/approach First, the general railway emergency plan was analyzed. Second, the HTPN-based framework model for the general railway emergency plan was proposed. Then, the instantiated model of electric multiple units rescue emergency plan was built by ExSpect, a Petri net simulation tool. Findings The experiments show that the proposed model is more digital and of better readability, visualization and performability, and, meanwhile, can generally conform to the practice well, offering a promising reference for future analysis of the optimization of railway emergency plans. Originality/value This study offers a promising reference for future analysis of the optimization of railway emergency plans.

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