| Jamaica is an island nation located in the Caribbean.The Jamaican Urban Transit Company(JUTC)is a government-owned and operated bus system that provides service throughout the Kingston Metropolitan Transport Region(KMTR).The JUTC’s mandate is to provide safe and reliable transportation service to commuters.While the JUTC provides a daily service schedule,it sometimes falls victim to operational delays.The primary research goal was to determine the critical components of the network to guide the maintenance and expansion of the transportation system.The research employed the Python Network X package to model the structure of JUTC,and analyzed the robustness of the network under failure and attack by computational simulation.The network has 864 nodes and 1049 edges,and its average route length is17.67 km and 35.88 km for outbound and inbound,respectively.The Half-Way Tree Transport center,West Parade,and Opp King Ital 4 Caledonia Cres were the three nodes with the highest degree.Longer routes tend to originate and terminate within Portmore,Spanish Town,and Down Town.Portmore,a densely populated town,makes up a large sector of the workforce within Kingston;and was the area with the most significant number of high degree nodes and high-frequency edges.Downtown Kingston also contained a substantial number of high degree nodes and high-frequency edges.Within the failure simulation,an average of 15.6% of nodes and 19.4% of edges were randomly removed before network connectivity decreased by half.While in the attack simulation,removing almost the same amount of key nodes and edges as the failure simulation will cause a larger reduction in network connectivity comparing to the failure simulation.The results show that the network connectivity strongly depended upon key nodes,which fall within close geographical areas.Network degree was affected more by key edge removal than with targeted node removal;thus the network has sufficient robustness with respect to node attacks,but will suffer greater damage from key edge removals.Additionally,targeted removal of key nodes or key edges resulted in a decrease in global efficiencies,with insignificant impact on local efficiencies.As known that the dynamic nature of the public transport system leads to the disruption spreading across the network via the redistribution of passenger flows and capacity fluctuations.Therefore,to secure the network connectivity,we should pay more attention to secure high frequency edges. |
