To answer this question: How do different operating schemes affect urban rail transit resilience? researchers at Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing Mass Transit Railway Operation Corporation Ltd., The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Dalian University of Technology, constructed a passenger-train coupled network percolation model to investigate the impact of different operating schemes on urban rail transit system.
They published their study on 1 April 2025, in Communications in Transportation Research .
"We develop a percolation-based resilience framework to analyze the Beijing urban rail transit system resilience under different operating schemes. This framework is based on multi-source data, such as train timetable data, smart card data, train routing data etc. Therefore, a more precise result can be obtained from our framework." says Xin Yang, a researcher at the School of Systems Science at Beijing Jiaotong University.
Percolation transition on URT network
When a given threshold q=0, the URT network during morning and evening rush hours is not intact, too heavy commuting passenger flow causes this phenomenon. As the threshold q increases, the URT network experiences gradual collapse at a given point in time. However, the same network exhibits substantial differences in terms of resilience for the threshold q.
During the morning rush hours, due to longer commuting times from suburban areas, traffic flows mainly from the fringes of the network towards its center currently, with failure links predominantly clustered around the network's periphery.
Conversely, at noon, traffic is distributed homogeneously across the URT network, resulting in improved network connectivity. And the evening rush hour, the performance of the URT network is better than in the morning rush hour.
Identification of bottleneck during phase transition
Identifying bottlenecks during the dynamic network evolution of URT is pivotal. Enhancing the capacity of bottlenecks and ensuring they do not malfunction after accidental damage can prevent the network from breaking into several small clusters and improve connectivity at a reasonable cost.
Therefore, we counted the number of times a bottleneck appeared in the network. The results show that the occurrence frequency and probability exhibit a typical power law distribution, indicating the links that become bottlenecks more often are very rare, and most of them become bottlenecks only a few times within a day.
About Communications in Transportation Research
Communications in Transportation Research was launched in 2021, with academic support provided by Tsinghua University and China Intelligent Transportation Systems Association. The Editors-in-Chief are Professor Xiaobo Qu, a member of the Academia Europaea from Tsinghua University and Professor Shuai'an Wang from Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The journal mainly publishes high-quality, original research and review articles that are of significant importance to emerging transportation systems, aiming to become an international platform and window for showcasing and exchanging innovative achievements in transportation and related fields, to promote the exchange and development of transportation research between China and the international academic community. It has been indexed in ESCI, Ei Compendex, Scopus, DOAJ, TRID and other databases. In 2022, it was selected as a high-starting-point new journal project of the "China Science and Technology Journal Excellence Action Plan". This year, it received the first impact factor of 12.5. The 2023 IF is 12.5, ranking in the Top1 (1/57, Q1) among all journals in "TRANSPORTATION" category. At its discretion, Tsinghua University Press will pay the open access fee for all published papers in 2025.
About Tsinghua University Press
Established in 1980, as a department of Tsinghua University, Tsinghua University Press (TUP) is a leading comprehensive higher education and professional publisher in China. TUP publishes 58 journals and 38 of them are in English. There are 18 journals indexed by SCIE/ESCI. Three of them have the highest impact factor in its field. In 2022, TUP launched SciOpen . As a publishing platform of TUP, SciOpen provides free access to an online collection of journals across diverse academic disciplines and serves to meet the research needs of scientific communities. SciOpen provides end-to-end services across manuscript submission, peer review, content hosting, analytics, identity management, and expert advice to ensure each journal's development.
