Cascading failures and maintenance optimization of urban transportation networks

Abstract

A convenient urban transportation network facilitates a high-quality life and a high-growth economy. Due to cascading failures being a ticklish question triggering continuous road congestion, the maintenance plan is momentous to restore the urban transportation network. Considering fault edges are removed and cars slowly drive out of these edges to ease traffic congestion, a traffic distribution model is proposed to analyze the cascading failures process. To resume the transportation network, this paper proposes a maintenance optimization with minimizing maintenance time. It recovers the cascading failures from two perspectives: the intra-area maintenance model and the inter-area maintenance model. At last, a transportation network of a city in China is regarded as a case study to illuminate the feasibility of the proposed models. The results show that on the premise of dividing traffic areas, it is reasonable to adopt the intra-area maintenance plan for cascading failures. Compared with the intra-area maintenance plan, the inter-area maintenance plan saves more time.