Analyzing the Railway Operation Network by Evaluating the Importance of Time-Space Nodes

Abstract

With the continuous expansion of the railway infrastructure network, the railway operation network has become more and more complex both in time and space dimensions. In order to help railway operators formulate management measures more pertinently, this research aims to develop a method to analyze the complex operation network via quantifying and ranking the importance of stations in different periods based on the train timetable. Firstly, we propose the time-space train origin-destination (OD) service network (OD-TS network) to abstractly describe the railway transportation service. And a network construction method is designed to build the OD-TS network according to the train operation information in the timetable. We further develop an improved <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">k</i> -shell decomposition method to quantify the node importance for the directed-weighted networks. Case studies are carried out based on the train timetable of China's high-speed railway. We study the OD-TS network from three perspectives (the global network, the railway hubs, and the stations) and analyze the spatiotemporal details of the railway operation. These analyses show that the proposed method can help the railway operators mine the spatiotemporal characteristics of the railway operation well.