Promoting Metro Operation Safety by Exploring Metro Operation Accident Network

Abstract Understanding the causation of accidents is essential to promote metro operation safety. In terms of 243 reported metro operation accident cases in China, a directed weighted network was constructed based on complex network theory, where nodes and directed edges denotes factors and event chains respectively. To reveal the key causal factors, the topological characteristics of metro operation accident network (MOAN) were analyzed from both global and local views. The results show that facility-type factors are more closely related to the occurrence of the accidents from the perspectives of average path length and cascading effects. Accident types like train delay and train suspension are the great risk recipients. Key causal factors with large out-degree, out-strength, betweenness centrality and cluster coefficient, such as communication and signal failure, vehicle failure and piling into the train should be noticed. The research framework proposed in the paper is not only applicable to China’s metro operation system, but also appropriate for other transportation system safety studies.