Analysis of Urban Road Network Robustness under Different Attack Conditions

In preventing large-scale congestion caused by urban road traffic attacks, both random and deliberate attack methods were employed, with the robustness of the traffic system analyzed using a cascading failure model. The details of the proposed methods are, firstly, a road network model is constructed based on a Geographic Information System (GIS), and the traffic flow data of a provincial city during peak traffic hours is obtained by Python. Then, the flow data of Origin-Destination (OD) pairs for the road network under normal operation is obtained using the OD estimation module in TransCAD, the urban transportation network is modeled based on the actual traffic flow distribution. Subsequently, random attacks and deliberate attacks based on traffic volume were conducted on the road network. The traffic flow of the attacked segments was reallocated according to a cascading failure model, with the robustness of the urban road network assessed using topological and traffic flow indicators. The results indicate that, in the robustness analysis considering cascading failures, deliberate attacks have a more significant impact on high-traffic segments compared to random attacks with the same number of attack steps. Therefore, future urban traffic management should focus on ensuring the efficiency of high-traffic road segments, and prevent it from becoming ineffective due to excessive traffic flow.