Robustness assessment of metro network: a case study of Beijing, China

Metro network provides mobility to residents and relieves traffic congestion, playing a vital role in the city’s operation. However, due to human faults and equipment failures, the metro network’s functionality and performance will be degraded to a lower level. Therefore, it is necessary to make a robustness assessment for making a safe and reliable metro system. In this paper, we choose Beijing’s metro network as an example to make a robustness assessment based on complex network theory and network science. A random attack and a variety of malicious attacks are imposed on the metro network. The numerical results show that Beijing metro network performs high robustness under random attacks but relatively low robustness under malicious attacks. The proposed method can be easily modified and applied in other metro systems for robustness assessment and enhancement.