Locating inefficient links in a large-scale transportation network

作者：Sun Li; Liu Like; Xu Zhongzhi; Jie Yang; Wei Dong; Wang Pu^*

来源：Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications , 2015, 419: 537-545.

DOI：10.1016/j.physa.2014.10.066

• Transportation network
• Network flow
• Transportation efficiency
• Braess's paradox

Based on data from geographical information system (GIS) and daily commuting origin destination (OD) matrices, we estimated the distribution of traffic flow in the San Francisco road network and studied Braess's paradox in a large-scale transportation network with realistic travel demand. We measured the variation of total travel time triangle T when a road segment is closed, and found that vertical bar triangle T vertical bar follows a power-law distribution if triangle T < 0 or triangle T > 0. This implies that most roads have a negligible effect on the efficiency of the road network, while the failure of a few crucial links would result in severe travel delays, and closure of a few inefficient links would counter-intuitively reduce travel costs considerably. Generating three theoretical networks, we discovered that the heterogeneously distributed travel demand may be the origin of the observed power-law distributions of vertical bar triangle T vertical bar. Finally, a genetic algorithm was used to pinpoint inefficient link clusters in the road network. We found that closing specific road clusters would further improve the transportation efficiency.

• 单位
  中南大学