Vulnerability analysis of the Chinese coupled aviation and high-speed railway network

The integrated aviation and High-Speed Railway (HSR) transportation system plays a vital role for today’s inter-city transportation services. However, an increasing number of unexpected disruptions (such as operation failures, natural disasters, or intentional attacks) pose a considerable threat to the normal operation of the system, especially on ground transfer, leading to the extensive research on its vulnerability. Previous approaches mainly focus on interruptions within a single transportation mode, neglecting the role of ground transfer which serves as a coupled connection between aviation and High-Speed Railway. This paper proposes a network-based framework for evaluating the vulnerability of the Chinese Coupled Aviation and High-Speed Railway (CAHSR) network from the viewpoint of ground transfer interruption. Taking the end-to-end travel time and passenger flow information into consideration as an evaluation measure and analyzing from the perspective of urban agglomerations, an adaptive method is developed to identify the critical cities and further investigate their failure impacts on the geographic distribution of vulnerability. In addition, the proposed model explores variations of vulnerability under different failure time intervals. Based on the empirical study, some major conclusions are highlighted as follows: (A) Only a few cities show significant impacts on the network’s vulnerability when ground transfer interruptions occurred. (B) The distribution of vulnerability is not proportional to the distance between failure city and influenced city. (C) The vulnerability is more serious in the morning and evening when the ground transfer is disconnected. Our findings may provide new insights for maintenance and optimization of the CAHSR network and other real-world transportation networks.