Critical station identification and robustness analysis of urban rail transit networks based on comprehensive vote-rank algorithm

Urban rail transit networks have become the most important traffic modal and greatly improve the traffic environment and travel efficiency of metropolis, and the critical station identification and robustness assessment of urban rail transit networks have become more and more important. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive vote-rank (CVR) algorithm to identify the critical stations, and adopt mutual information and k-center clustering algorithm to analyze the similar characteristics of passenger flow on different dates of urban rail transit networks. Meanwhile, Shanghai metro network is chosen as the example and we find that the optimal classification of passenger flow on different dates is 2 categories, and the passenger flows have the significant differences between conventional day and unconventional day. The results show that the critical stations on unconventional day are farther from the city center than the critical stations on conventional day, and some critical stations locate in the suburbs on unconventional day. Moreover, we study the structural and functional robustness characteristics of urban rail transit networks subjected to continuous malicious attacks to the top critical nodes, and the results show that Shanghai metro network has the worse robustness subjected to malicious attacks. Compared with the existed methods, we can declare that the proposed CVR algorithm is the most effective method for critical station identification and robustness assessment among the discussed methods in this paper, and this study will provide theoretical and practical support for the safe operation of urban rail transit networks.