Complex Network Analysis Of China High-Speed Railway

In this paper,China high-speed railway(HSR)transportation system is analyzed as an undirected unweighted complex network to find the critical changes that the network will exhibit soon with the construction of new lines and stations.The planned HSR network and the current one are compared using several network analysis techniques.The results show that upon the implementation of the future HSR network,many previously isolated cities will be connected.There will be a significant increase in network size,a decrease in the diameter,and an overall improvement in the network connectivity,which will turn some intermediary cities into more essential hubs of the HSR network.Moreover,the shortest path length between most cities in the planned HSR network will be reduced,resulting in a lower characteristic path length than the current HSR network.Some highly central cities(in terms of betweenness and closeness)will be replaced by newly emerging hub cities in the planned HSR network.These novel hubs will lead to a change in the distribution of the HSR traffic flow.This change will influence the socio-economic activity in the cities and the robustness of the HSR network.As to the network robustness,it was found that China HSR network will have higher tolerance against possible node failures.The robustness of the HSR network was measured by certain topological structure indicators,subjecting the networks to random and targeted removal of nodes.In both the current and planned HSR networks,a large number of randomly removed nodes cause severe fragmentation of the network structure.In contrast,a targeted attack on a relatively smaller number of nodes could crash both the HSR networks into pieces.In this thesis,the analysis was conducted mainly based on the network?s topological structure.We believe that with the availability of detailed network data,further studies could reveal more unexplored critical features of the HSR network.