A game theory approach for the measurement of transport network vulnerability from the system prospective

Abstract

Measuring the transport network vulnerability has become an important research issue recently. With the increase in the road user's value of time, users are now not only concerned about taking the shortest route to save travel times, but also decrease the variances by choosing a route that is more reliable to arrive at the destination within an acceptable time frame. Ensuring a reliable network and providing alternative options under network breakdowns are very important to reduce the network vulnerability. This paper proposed a potentially computationally efficient approach to measure system-level network vulnerability through a game theory approach. The most vulnerable link is indicated by link failure probabilities and the overall vulnerability measure of the network is represented by the expected total travel time. The performances are compared and discussed through the numerical results from several reliability improvement strategies.