Resilience of public transport networks against attacks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how public transport networks respond to targeted attacks, revealing their vulnerabilities and proposing minimal strategies that significantly disrupt these complex systems.

Contribution

It introduces vulnerability criteria for public transport networks and analyzes the impact of directed attack strategies on their robustness.

Findings

Public transport networks exhibit scale-free behavior.

Targeted attacks can significantly compromise network integrity.

Minimal attack strategies can cause high disruption.

Abstract

The behavior of complex networks under failure or attack depends strongly on the specific scenario. Of special interest are scale-free networks, which are usually seen as robust under random failure but appear to be especially vulnerable to targeted attacks. In recent studies of public transport networks of fourteen major cities of the world it was shown that these systems when represented by appropriate graphs may exhibit scale-free behavior [C. von Ferber et al., Physica A 380, 585 (2007), Eur. Phys. J. B 68, 261 (2009)]. Our present analysis, focuses on the effects that defunct or removed nodes have on the properties of public transport networks. Simulating different directed attack strategies, we derive vulnerability criteria that result in minimal strategies with high impact on these systems.