Assessing Node Importance and Network Resilience in Chicago’s Transportation Network
UCLA Department of Mathematics, MATH168 Introduction to Networks
I wrote a research paper that identifies the key intersections in the Chicago transportation network through the commonly used measures of closeness centrality and local betweenness centrality (LBC), a variant of the more common betweenness centrality. Furthermore, the tolerance of this city network to intersection closures was assessed by measuring how the diameter of the network increased in response to the removal of nodes, a method that has been developed in theory but not applied to the Chicago transportation network. This paper finds that the Chicago city network fragments catastrophically at a critical threshold of 40% of nodes removed. These findings are useful for urban city planners to analyze how intersection closure may impact traffic and travel time across the city of Chicago and therefore which intersections are the most important to keep open. You can find the full research paper here.
