Transfer stability of urban subway network with passenger flow: Evidence in Beijing

Abstract

Stability of urban subway systems is a crucial issue in daily operation. This paper proposes a node failing process to test the stability of subway network by structure-based and flow-based node evaluation indicators. Furthermore, three network evaluation indicators are used to measure the network performance. The average transfer number of times (ATT) that is strongly associated with network structure and passenger flow will be discussed specifically. The results show that removing nodes with large inbound passenger flow cannot effectively damage the subway network structure, but it can result in significant increment of the ATT in the whole network. Another finding is that the ATT is smaller in peak hours compared with off-peak hours.