Analysis of railway systems applying complex networks: the case of Mexican Railway system

Abstract

At the 2014 International Transport Forum, it was established that ports, border crossings and key industrial centers in Mexico are well connected. Under this premise, the Mexican rail network was analyzed applying the complex networks approach; through the corresponding performance measures, the relevance of the stations was determined; then the robustness against targeted attacks and against random failures was analyzed. The degree follows an exponential probability distribution; it was identified a set of nodes that controls 19% of the shortest routes; two cities are included in the set; five points are closest to the rest of nodes; the same two cities are also included in the set. Through the closeness centrality we observed that in the Mexican network the distance between the stations shows low variability. The network is sensitive attacks directed to the nodes with the highest betweenness value; the number of components increases faster compared to random failures. This work is of interest to those responsible for the management and planning of transport systems.