Enhancing energy and resource-use efficiency integrally with greater adoption of clean and environmentally friendly industrial processes are the primary goals in modern engineering design. Optimizing ventilation conditions during tunnelling represents a challenging task with great potential to improve the working environment and generate economic benefits through reduced construction time and energy costs. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models are generally applied to analyse the flow behaviour within an underground facility and determine optimal solutions for the ventilation system arrangement and pollution monitoring. The objective of this study is to assess the performance of the Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS) software by comparing it with the field study results and outputs of the most widely used program in the field, ANSYS Fluent. For this purpose, several publications with the obtained by Fluent and verified through field measurements findings are analysed. The reported tunnel geometry, ventilation conditions and experimental setups are used to design FDS models and predict the airflow pattern and parameters. Calculated air velocity values show that FDS provides comparable to Fluent output while certain adjustments to the settings allow obtaining data (magnitude and behaviour trends) that are in good agreement with the experimental results. The study demonstrates that FDS can be considered a valuable tool for evaluating the flow distribution in tunnel areas, though further examinations are needed to use it for more complicated problems, in particular for dust dispersion analysis in order to significantly raise health and safety performance in construction and operation of underground infrastructure systems.