Reliability assessments of Chinese high speed railway network

With the economic developments, high speed railway has been paid many attentions in China and medium- short term planning of Chinese high speed railway network has been formed and most of the railways have been started into operations. In this paper, graph theory and complex network theory are adopted to assess the reliability of Chinese high speed railway network. The topological characteristics and real distances between pairs of stations are discussed to investigate the reliability of Chinese high-speed rail network. Several parameters are presented to investigate the topological characteristics and the reliability and robustness of the network subject to failures. The parameter called unit degree betweenness is proposed to assess the transport capacity of lines connecting with the nodes. The largest degree node-based attacks and the highest betweenness node-based attacks are involved into Chinese high speed railway network to assess the topological reliability and robustness. The results show that the highest betweenness node-based attacks are more effective to destroy the network than the largest degree node-based attacks. Moreover, the cumulative degree distribution and the real mileages of railways between pairs of stations can be fitted by Gauss functions, and the distribution of real shortest distances over all pairs of stations of the network is fitted by a normal distribution function. By the simulations, the critical stations, Guangzhou Station, Zhengzhou Station and Jinan Station for the largest degree node-based attacks, and Wuhan Station, Xuzhou Station and Shijiazhuang Station for the highest betweenness node-based attacks, can be obtained in this paper.