The study of critical nodes of road network based on traffic shockwave model

In order to guarantee the reliability of road networks, critical nodes or links should be mined and protected. At present, several researches have proposed some methods to evaluate the importance of nodes. But these researches focused rather on topological characteristics of road networks than on their traffic characteristics. The paper proposes a novel approach to study the identification of the critical nodes of road networks, which takes traffic characteristics into consideration besides topological factors. The traffic shockwave model is proposed, and numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the application and efficiency of the model.