Identifying critical urban intersections from a fine-grained spatio-temporal perspective

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With the rising travel demand of crowds, urban road networks are under increasing pressure, which makes them progressively more fragile. Accurate identification of critical intersections is essential for urban management, resource allocation and traffic supervision. However, existing intersection evaluation methods fail to fully exploit transportation infrastructure, travel behavior and their synergistic relationships, resulting in coarse-grained and low-dynamic evaluation results. In this study, we develop an urban Intersection Evaluation framework from a Fine-grained Spatio-Temporal perspective (IE-FST). The framework is divided into three parts: fine-grained extraction of intersection information, multi-perspective assessment of node importance, and dynamic perception of spatio-temporal patterns in importance ranking. Specifically, IE-FST upgrades the intersection evaluation scale to turn-level, proposes the concept of Turning Sub-Node (TSN) and constructs a refined TSN topology network. Then, by finely extracting the network properties and mobility patterns of TSNs and mining the association patterns among TSNs, IE-FST proposes a Critical Fine-grained node Identification (CFI) algorithm to achieve a refined and dynamic evaluation of urban intersections. Finally, IE-FST analyzes the temporal characteristics and spatial distribution of TSN importance rankings, and provides traffic management measures for different types of TSNs to improve urban transport efficiency. Experiments are performed in Wuhan, China, and the results indicate that the proposed IE-FST framework achieves an accurate perception of urban intersections with high spatial and temporal resolution. This study promotes a better understanding of the synergistic relationships between crowd travel movements and urban transportation infrastructure, and provides theoretical support for infrastructure siting, refined traffic supervision, and rational resource allocation, thus contributing to the resilient and sustainable development of transportation systems and society.