Resilience assessment of highway–railway composite network in urban agglomeration

Urban agglomeration transport networks are easily affected by problems such as internal failures, natural disasters or deliberate attacks, which can lead to functional fragmentation and make it difficult to meet the needs of the region's economic and social security development. To improve the resilience of urban agglomeration transport networks and solving this important real-world problem, a directionless and weightless urban agglomeration highway–railway composite network (HRCN) was constructed based on complex network theory by selecting 17 highway stations and 44 railway stations in Shandong province, China, as the nodes of the network, and by considering the transport links between the stations as the adjacent edges. Deliberate attacks and random attacks based on the continuous failure of network nodes were selected for Matlab simulations and the resilience of the HRCN was evaluated from three dimensions – absorbing ability, buffering ability and recovery ability. A spatial vector model was used to calculate the network resilience value. The research results can provide decision support for the development of policies to enhance the resilience of regional transport systems and help improve the security level of national comprehensive transport networks.