Spatiotemporal vulnerability analysis of railway system

This paper aims to develop a comprehensive framework to analyze the spatiotemporal vulnerability of railway systems assessed by passengers delay under disruptions and the framework integrates the time-related attributes of disruptions, railway system, and heterogeneous train flows. In the framework, the modeling of the railway system involves a two-layer network structure consisting of physical layer and service layer. The proposed framework introduces the concept of component damage scenario to represent the post-disruption state of railway component. Combination of the component damage scenarios can represent the system damage status under any kinds of disruptions. This study applies the proposed framework to the Chinese high-speed railway system and analyzes its spatiotemporal vulnerability under two types of disruptions: individual station failure and spatially localized failures. The finding of this study facilitate the design of system maintenance strategies to mitigate system vulnerability under various disruptions