Research on Small World Characteristic of Urban Road Network

Small world model provides a new aspect and method for exploring the topological structure and intrinsic characters of urban road network.This paper has moderately abstracted the urban road network through primal approach.Having processed spatial data and computed attribute data based on ArcGIS 9.0 and Matlab 7.0,the paper studies the small world characteristic of urban road network.By taking new district in Wuxi City as study case,the paper has also analyzed its urban road network characteristic.Results show that the urban road network in the example adduced here has small characteristic path length and large clustering coefficient,which is the typical small world characteristic,and the deeper study on the local networks shows that small world characteristic of networks is relevant to spatial structure characteristic,such as crowed degree and distributed structure.Combining the state of local case,conclusions have been drawn out that the urban road network should be constructed as a small world network with proper structure.The study plays an important role in the suggestion for rational development and optimization model of urban road network in rapid urbanization.