Centrality of an Urban Rail System

W M To

doi:10.1007/s40864-016-0031-3

Abstract

Railway re-emerges as one of the most important man-made physical systems in the world. Hundreds of million passengers travel by trains within cities. Hence, the management and maintenance of rail and station facilities are crucial. The paper introduces five centrality measures and explains whether and how these measures can be applied to the network analysis of urban rail systems. Centrality measures were used to identify the characteristics of Hong Kong’s urban rail system. Results showed that betweenness centrality is the most appropriate measure to indicate the relative importance of a station based on its potential on strategic facility management and risk management in an urban rail system.

Highlights

Rail networks have been one of the prime movers of world economies since the industrial revolution [1]
Railway is one of the most important transportation modes because it is very efficient and environmentally friendly to carry a large number of passengers from one location to another [11, 43], in order to provide a quick and efficient evaluation of the relative importance of stations in an urban rail system for facility management and risk management
This paper introduces five centrality measures and provides a detailed historical review of their development, formulations, and applications

Summary

Introduction

Rail networks have been one of the prime movers of world economies since the industrial revolution [1]. Hong Kong’s urban rail system (MTR system) carries over 70,000 passengers per hour per direction during peak hours To address such concerns, this paper describes an alternative approach that has five centrality measures (following the suggestions from Ning et al [9, 11, 12] who advocate the interaction between humans and engineering systems). Freeman [34] reviewed the concepts of point and graph centrality and explained three measures of centrality, namely degree centrality, closeness centrality, and betweenness centrality, in great detail He suggested that degree centrality can be viewed as the importance index of a node for its potential to participate in the communication activity.

Flow Processes and Centrality Measures

An Example

Findings

Conclusion