Transportation Network Stability: a Case Study of City Traffic

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the resilience of city public transportation networks against targeted attacks by analyzing the stability of their largest components during node and edge removals, using a robustness measure based on the area under the attack curve.

Contribution

It introduces a method to quantify the attack stability of real-world transportation networks and compares these results with theoretical models for infinite uncorrelated networks.

Findings

City PTNs show varying robustness against attacks.

The robustness measure effectively captures network resilience.

Results align with theoretical predictions for uncorrelated networks.

Abstract

The goals of this paper are to present criteria, that allow to a priori quantify the attack stability of real world correlated networks of finite size and to check how these criteria correspond to analytic results available for infinite uncorrelated networks. As a case study, we consider public transportation networks (PTN) of several major cities of the world. To analyze their resilience against attacks either the network nodes or edges are removed in specific sequences (attack scenarios). During each scenario the size S(c) of the largest remaining network component is observed as function of the removed share c of nodes or edges. To quantify the PTN stability with respect to different attack scenarios we use the area below the curve described by S(c) for c \in [0,1] recently introduced (Schneider, C. M, et al., PNAS 108 (2011) 3838) as a numerical measure of network robustness. This measure captures the network reaction over the whole attack sequence. We present results of the analysis of PTN stability against node and link-targeted attacks.