Evaluation of railway systems: a network approach

Resilience and the efficiency of transportation systems are crucial for the economic development of geographical areas, and network analysis applied to railways can provide insight into the importance of branch lines and their impacts on the entire system. This paper explores the behavior of the ERC measure, a local robustness measure, on the railway network in Lombardy, Italy, and analyzes the impacts of deactivating stations or journeys on the network’s robustness. Changes in the topological properties of the network were studied by simulating potential external disturbances and analyzing the impact of deleting the most connected stations or railway lines. The numerical results show how the measures provided effectively identify critical stations and journeys within the network structure and outperform classical topological metrics. Since ERC measures take into account all of the alternative paths present in the network, they can provide valuable information for rerouting traffic along alternative paths in case of failures or disruptions. The paper’s original contribution lies in demonstrating the effectiveness of the ERC measure in identifying critical stations and journeys within the network structure.