Resilience of socio-technical transportation systems: A demand-driven community detection in human mobility structures

Authors

Ho-Yin Chan
Hanxi Ma
Jiangping Zhou

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2024

Subject Area

place - asia, place - urban, technology - passenger information, technology - ticketing systems, ridership - behaviour, ridership - demand

Keywords

Transportation resilience, Socio-technical, Urban structure, Community detection, Random walk, Infomap, Hong Kong

Abstract

Existing scholarship on transportation resilience analysis has primarily focused on engineering resilience, often overlooking the intricate socio-technical dimensions. This oversight underscores the necessity for a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamic interplay between social, including travel behaviors, and technical infrastructure components within transportation systems. This article delves into the impact of “social shocks” on transportation systems, which are defined as disturbances affecting the social subsystem without yet affecting the technical subsystem. Drawing inspiration from C.S. Holling’s ecological resilience, which signifies a system’s ability to cope with change by adapting its structure and functionality, we propose a multi-level resilience assessment framework. It encompasses four mobility-related indicators: entropy (measuring network-level complexity), stationarity (assessing community compositional changes at the cluster level), and two node-level metrics — within-module degree and weighted participation coefficient — capturing location connectivity. These indicators proxy for evaluating the mobility structure and node functionality within the social subsystem. In a case study, we analyze historical smart card data to examine the mobility pattern’s structural changes within Hong Kong, a rail-oriented metropolis, during a prolonged and city-wide protest. The framework and associated indicators provide an alternative perspective for transit planners and operators, allowing them to assess both the overall system and individual stations, moving beyond traditional assessments of service supply and patronage changes.

Rights

Permission to publish the abstract has been given by Elsevier, copyright remains with them.

Comments

Transportation Research Part A Home Page:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09658564

Recommended Citation

Chan, H. Y., Ma, H., & Zhou, J. (2024). Resilience of socio-technical transportation systems: A demand-driven community detection in human mobility structures. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 190, 104244.