Vulnerability assessment of China–Europe Railway Express multimodal transport network under cascading failures

Abstract

Transshipment and transnational long-haul transport make the multimodal transport network (MTN) vulnerable when subjected to unexpected disturbances, which may cause cascading failures. Therefore, this paper presents a dynamic layered road–rail MTN to measure the vulnerability of China–Europe Railway Express (CR Express) MTN. The statistical analysis of the topological characteristics and the final simulation results show that the layered road–rail MTN with priority connection mechanism exhibits power-law distribution characteristics. The final simulation results reveal that the road–rail MTN shows a better ability to suppress the risk cascading propagation when the transshipment coupling enhances the dynamic flexibility of the network. Although the optimal inter-layer transshipment coupling changes positively with the external disturbance and negatively with the intra-layer coupling in special cases, the moderate inter-layer coupling is still the most effective in improving the anti-cascading ability of general MTN. These findings provide recommendations for the CR Express MTN to suppress the cascading failures.