Evaluating Disruption in Rail Transit Network: A Case Study of Beijing Subway

Disruption means serious deviation from the planned operations. In this paper, static disruption management problems of rail transit network are discussed: the importance evaluation problem and the disruption impact problem. For importance evaluation problem, betweenness based evaluation indexes of stations, edges and lines are established based on K shortest paths and passenger flow; for disruption impact problems, the global efficiency is adopted to evaluate how well the subway system works before and after the disruptions. And three levels of attack strategies are designed to describe the disruptions. Finally, Beijing subway is studied. The result of case study shows: (1)our proposed importation evaluation model based on expanded betweenness concepts can be used to evaluate the subway's importance in different levels; (2)removal of even a few lines, stations or edges with a high betweenness will result in a big decline in the efficiency of subway network; (3)Beijing subway network is robust against random disruptions but fragile for intentional attacks.