Identification of Key Nodes of Urban Rail Transit Integrating Network Topology Characteristics and Passenger Flow

A scientific and rational method to identify the key nodes is useful for formulating targeted management measures and the stable operation of urban rail transits. The nodes play the role of external transmission and connection locally and affect the transmission efficiency of the network globally. Since one node will inevitably be affected by other nodes in the network, an improved node degree model considering the influence of neighbor nodes was proposed to evaluate the local importance of nodes, and an improved node efficiency model considering the influence of other nodes in the network was proposed to evaluate the global importance of nodes. Based on the improved node degree model and the improved node efficiency model, a node structural importance evaluation model was constructed. This model can comprehensively reflect the local and global importance of nodes, as well as the impact of other nodes on the target node. From the perspective of passenger flow, a node flow importance model based on the inbound and outbound passenger flow and transfer passenger flow was established. Furthermore, a model considering the importance of network topology and passenger flow was conducted to identify the key nodes in urban rail transit. The proposed models were verified based on the data in Xi'an. The results show that the identified key nodes can reflect their functional characteristics in the network. The failure of the identified top 5 key nodes will result in 34.41% of passenger flow loss, 57% of network efficiency reduction, and 91.82% of the relative size of the largest connected subgraph reduction. The results indicate that the proposed models are effective and practical. © 2022 Science Press. All rights reserved.