Urban Transit Network Properties Evaluation and Optimization Based on Complex Network Theory

Guo-Ling Jia, Rong-Guo Ma and Zhi-Hua Hu
Additional contact information
Guo-Ling Jia: School of Highway, Chang’an University, Xi’an 710064, China
Rong-Guo Ma: School of Highway, Chang’an University, Xi’an 710064, China
Zhi-Hua Hu: Logistics Research Center, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai 201306, China

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 7, 1-16

Abstract: Urban public transportation contributes greatly to sustainable urban development. An urban public transportation network is a complex system. It is meaningful for theory and practice to analyze the topological structure of an urban public transportation network and explore the spatial structure of an urban transportation network so as to mitigate and prevent traffic congestion and achieve sustainability. By examining the Xi’an bus network, the degree distribution, average path length, aggregation coefficient, and betweenness centrality of the bus station network were computed using models in complex network theory. The results show that the node degrees of the Xi’an bus network are unevenly distributed and present a polarization diagram with long average path length and high aggregation. A model based on betweenness and its solution method was developed to improve the public transportation network’s sustainability and discuss the possibility of optimizing the sustainability by network analyzing methods.

Keywords: public transport network; complex network theory; network analysis; logistics management; sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/7/2007/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/7/2007/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:7:p:2007-:d:219961

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().