Structural Analysis of Iran Railway Network based on Complex Network Theory

Abstract

In this paper, the Iran railway network has been analyzed based on structural properties and vulnerabilities. To do this, more than 400 cities have been extracted from Iran railway information and the network has been constructed accordingly. Then, multiple structural properties of the network have been investigated including degree distribution, betweenness, clustering coefficient, and distance distribution. Finally, the network reliability has been studied intensively using random as well as adversarial attacks. According to the calculations, the average degree of the nodes is about 2 and the average shortest path length is about 40. Thus the network would require a structural optimization to improve the economic benefits. Also, according to the attacks made on the nodes, the global efficiency of the network will be dropped more rapidly using the maximum-betweenness attack. Moreover, only small parts of the network could keep their functionality as the size of the giant component is decreased very sharply when less than 20% nodes are removed from the network randomly or intentionally.