Vulnerability assessment and visualization of large-scale bus transit network under route service disruption

Abstract

Having a vulnerability assessment of a large-scale bus transit network (LBTN), an essential part of urban vulnerability assessment, is indispensable for developing urban transportation sustainability. The complex network approach is usually used to realize this goal because it focuses on a mesoscopic perspective and has a unique advantage of calculation efficiency in large-scale networks. However, the vulnerability assessment of LBTNs is usually tested based on node attacks or edge attacks rather than route attacks because of the widely existing “route collinear problem”, which makes the infrastructure disruption and the route service disruption indistinguishable. This paper establishes a novel vulnerability assessment and visualization framework under the perspective of route service disruption. This framework provides a novel perspective for understanding complex systems, lays the foundation for LBTN risk identification, and significantly lowers the availability barrier of the required data, thereby extending the vulnerability study framework based on a complex network approach, from statistical physics to engineering.