The Vulnerability Analysis Of Railway Marshalling Yards Based On The Theory Of Complex Network

Marshalling yards, as the basic production units of railway network, are the important car flow distribution centers and transportation hubs. The locations of marshalling yards play an important role in improving the situation of car flow organization, ensuring successfully of freight transportation and increasing the sustainable development of railway transportation. So the vulnerability of marshalling yards is related to the steady of whole network and affects the benefit of car flow organization. The research of the vulnerability has very important significance for the discovery of the weak link in the railway transport system and optimizing the planning of our country’s road network layout.On the basis of primary research and combining the organizational features of China’s railway transport and the future direction of development, this paper analyze the vulnerability of40important marshalling yards by using the complex network theory. The main Innovations of this paper are as follows:1. We use the complex network theory to analyze and compute the layout properties of marshalling yards. Railway freight geographic network model and railway freight car flow network model are established. This paper analyzes the marshalling yards’ Degree, Betweenness, the correlation of degree and betweenness, Clustering coefficient and Rich group coefficient.2. The importance of marshalling yards in the geographic network is defined and is used to analyze the vulnerability of marshalling yard. The Degree, Betweenness and Proximity of marshalling yards are chosen as evaluation index of importance of marshalling yards. And then we get the importance of each marshalling yard by using Analytic Hierarchy Process and we explain the conclusions on the basis of real network.3. This paper defines the vulnerability of marshalling yards strictly on the basis of railway freight geography network’s efficiency. After comparing with the vulnerability based on topology network from method and conclusion, the vulnerability based on weighting network is determined as the expression form of the vulnerability of marshalling yards. Also the comparative analysis between the compute method and conclusion of the vulnerability and importance of marshalling yards shows that these two are positively correlated. The vulnerability and importance are consistency, which prove that it is reasonable to analyze the vulnerability of marshalling yards by using the importance.4. In this paper, a qualitative method which indirectly reflects the marshalling yards’ vulnerability is proposed. The analyze method based on network structure entropy can demonstrate the differences between the vulnerability of the marshalling yards that have different statistical properties. The network structure entropy based on Betweenness is better than the network structure entropy based on Degree when they are used to analyze the vulnerability of network’s nodes.