Vulnerability evaluation of high-speed railway network under wind disasters

The high-speed railway offers dominant transportation services, but unexpected disruptions will lead to significant performance losses and high vulnerability in the high-speed railway network (HSRN). Existing studies have evaluated the vulnerability of HSRN generally using decentralized indicators from a single topological or service perspective under the random/deliberate attacks, without considering the practical disaster probability and the overall loss of network performance. Besides, the temporal and spatial changes of network vulnerability have not been examined. To address these limitations, this study proposes a method to evaluate the vulnerability of HSRN under wind disasters, which includes two parts: (1) Construct a three-layer railway network model to evaluate the comprehensive performance from the transportation accessibility perspective. (2) Classify the wind disaster and simulate its interruptions using a new data-driven attack strategy to calculate the loss of HSRN performance. Finally, the case study of China’s HSRN is conducted to verify the feasibility of the model. The results show that the performance of stations is not the sole factor determining the vulnerability. HSRN vulnerability exhibits apparent spatiotemporal distribution, affected by wind disaster intensity as well as the density of network and geographic layout. The findings could offer insights for disaster control and management in rail transportation.