Weak nodes detection in urban transport systems: Planning for resilience in Singapore

TL;DR

This paper introduces ACHILLES, a web-based tool that models urban mobility as a multiplex network to identify weak nodes and assess transport system resilience, demonstrated through Singapore's flood response scenario.

Contribution

The paper presents ACHILLES, a novel application that visualizes mobility fluxes and identifies weakest nodes in urban transport networks for resilience planning.

Findings

ACHILLES effectively identifies weak nodes in Singapore's transport system.

The tool enables visualization of transport network changes and resilience assessment.

Application demonstrates utility in flood response planning.

Abstract

The availability of massive data-sets describing human mobility offers the possibility to design simulation tools to monitor and improve the resilience of transport systems in response to traumatic events such as natural and man-made disasters (e.g. floods terroristic attacks, etc...). In this perspective, we propose ACHILLES, an application to model people's movements in a given transport system mode through a multiplex network representation based on mobility data. ACHILLES is a web-based application which provides an easy-to-use interface to explore the mobility fluxes and the connectivity of every urban zone in a city, as well as to visualize changes in the transport system resulting from the addition or removal of transport modes, urban zones, and single stops. Notably, our application allows the user to assess the overall resilience of the transport network by identifying its weakest node, i.e. Urban Achilles Heel, with reference to the ancient Greek mythology. To demonstrate the impact of ACHILLES for humanitarian aid we consider its application to a real-world scenario by exploring human mobility in Singapore in response to flood prevention.