Enhancing resilience assessment and bus bridging service design for large‐scale rail transit systems under disruptions

Abstract

This paper proposes a more computationally efficient approach for resilience assessment of rail transit system under disruptions. An improved linear programming model is developed to depict commuter flows and estimate system statuses. To address the computational challenge caused by the complexity of system, a four‐step approach is proposed based on the proposed commuter flow model. In the first step, Origin‐Destination (OD) pairs are divided into smaller groups and their flows under normal conditions are estimated by the proposed model separately, with the assumption that the railway capacity is sufficient relative to demand. Next, overall system statuses under normal conditions, including commuters on each train and spare capacities of each train are calculated by integrating results obtained in the first step. In the third step, system statuses under disruptions are estimated. In this step, we assume that unaffected commuters will not change their routes and flows of all affected commuters are estimated by a modified commuter model with given spare space of trains. Based on these outputs, several critical measures are introduced and calculated to quantify the resilience, resistance, and recovery ability of rail network systematically. We also demonstrate how our approach could be used to facilitate design and evaluation of bus bridging service. The proposed approach is demonstrated on the core part of Hangzhou rail transit network.