Characteristic Analysis of the High-speed Railway Network: a Spatio-temporal Network Perspective

High-Speed Railway(HSR), due to its advantages of high-velocity, large capacity, punctuality, et al., developed rapidly in recent years, forming a networked operation scale. The connectivity status for different Origin-Destination(OD) pairs varied with time according to train timetables. To reveal the dynamic characteristics of the HSR network resulted from the changing connection status of OD pairs, this paper proposed an HSR Spatio-temporal Network(SN) model to analyze the dynamic characteristics of the HSR network. Then the spatio-temporal characteristic path length and the spatio-temporal betweenness centrality are studied by transforming the SN network into a Spatio-temporal Nodes based Network(SNN). Moreover, an indicator named spatio-temporal connectivity is proposed to derive the connectivity status variation of the HSR. Cases study reveal the quantitative relationship between the train timetable and the transportation performance and the evolution law of the network characteristics. The results could be used further to optimize the organization of trains from a network perspective.