Structural vulnerability and intervention of high speed railway networks

This paper employs complex network theory to assess the structural vulnerability of high speed railway networks subjected to two different malicious attacks. Chinese, US and Japanese high speed railway networks are used to discuss the vulnerable characteristics of systems. We find that high speed railway networks are very fragile when suffering serious disturbances and two attack rules can cause analogous damages to one high speed railway network, which illustrates that the station with large degree possesses high betweenness, vice versa. Meanwhile, we discover that Japanese high speed railway network has the best global connectivity, but Chinese high speed railway network has the best local connectivity and possesses the largest transport capacity. Moreover, we find that there exist several redundant paths in Chinese high speed railway network and discover the critical stations of three HSRNs. Furthermore, the nearest-link method is adopted to implement topological interventions and to improve the connectivity and reliability of high speed railway networks. In addition, the feasibility and effectiveness of topological interventions are shown by simulations.