Characterizing the Connectivity of Railway Networks

How well stations are connected with each other is a critical performance assessment of railway systems. Network analysis is a highly intuitive and interpretable approach to characterizing the physical connectivity of railway systems. However, the physical connectivity is often limited in depicting transportation network dynamics due to the lack of traffic flow information. This paper first comprehensively reviews the physical connectivity metrics and applies these metrics to evaluate the connectivity of China's high-speed railway system. Then, through integrating the real-world network topology and travel demand data, we conduct the first data-driven research on comparing the physical connectivity with the logical connectivity of railway systems. The experiments demonstrate that the physical connectivity metrics cannot well represent the connectivity of railway systems, due to the neglect of the heterogeneous distribution and temporal patterns of the passenger flows.