Node importance identifying considering passenger flow effect: a case study of Chengdu metro

In view of the fact that most existing research on the node importance identifying of metro network mainly use topological indicators which cannot reflect the actual metro operations, thus three weighted single centrality indicators, a weighted comprehensive centrality indicator, and a novel index of metro network service efficiency based on the influence of passenger flow were constructed. Taking the Chengdu metro network as case study, node importance rankings considering the passenger flow and no passenger flow for both single centrality indicators and the comprehensive centrality indicator were obtained. In addition, based on the ranking results of different indicators, the simulation of single-node attacks that used service efficiency to measure the network performance was carried out to verify the rationality of indicators considering the passenger flow and find out the weak components of the network. The results show that the ranking of node importance that considering the influence of passenger flow will change greatly than those without considering the flow; the comprehensive centrality indicator is more effective than the single centrality indicator, and it can predict the weak components more accurately in the network.