Alternative network robustness measure using system-wide transportation capacity for identifying critical links in road networks

In transportation planning works, critical links identification is helpful to evaluate the vulnerable parts of the designed network schemes. A new capacity-based network robustness index is presented for identifying critical links and evaluating the transportation system performance. It uses the change of the total network capacity as an evaluation measure. The advanced practical network capacity model is employed to estimate the throughput of transportation system. A sensitivity analysis based algorithm is also developed to solve the practical capacity model efficiently. The capacity-based network robustness index identifies the links which play critical roles in the transportation capacity of the whole network. The capacity-based network robustness index is an effective supplementary to the existing network evaluation indices. The experiments demonstrate the differences between the capacity-based network robustness index and the efficiency-based network robustness index. The capacity-based network robustness index can be used as a practical measure in the situations where the network robustness index is not significant.