STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF THE INDIAN RAILWAY NETWORK: A COMPLEX NETWORK APPROACH∗

In this paper, we study the Indian Railway Network (IRN) as a weighted complex network in which railway stations are considered as the nodes, while the weights on edges represent the number of trains directly linking two stations. Apart from the small-world characteristics and exponential distributions of node-degrees and edge-weights in the IRN, we explore the correlations of the amount of traffic with the topology of the network. The traffic in the IRN is found to be accumulated on interconnected groups of stations and is concentrated in the links between large stations. We also identify the most important stations in the IRN with respect to connectivity and traffic-flow, which help to identify some of the probable points (and regions) of congestion in the network. The study indicates several guidelines to improve the performance of the IRN. DOI:10.5506/APhysPolBSupp.4.12