Vulnerability analysis of the rail transit network under station, link and traffic demand disruption strategies

To assess the operational performance of urban rail transit networks (URTN) under various disruptions, this paper studies vulnerability for different types of disruptions. First, the URTN is modeled as a complex network such that indexes of nodes and the URTN are proposed to quantify importance of nodes and network’s vulnerability, where the traffic demand of stations is considered and a stochastic user equilibrium model is utilized to assign passenger flows. Then, given features of nodes and common disruption scenarios, three types of disruption strategies regarding station, link, and traffic demand are developed to accurately capture the impact of practical disruptions. Finally, the real-world Beijing URTN and traffic demand are taken as an example to perform the case study. Experiments show that for different levels of traffic demand, the flow-based station (link) disruption strategies under station (link) disruption scenarios lead to significant vulnerability of the URTN, respectively. Under traffic demand disruption strategies, vulnerability is substantially aggravated by the increased demand of stations with a high traffic demand. In addition, traffic demand disruption is more harmful to normal operation than station disruption when the overall traffic demand of the URTN is relatively high. Additionally, critical stations and links are identified and further analyzed in this case study.