Identifying the critical nodes in multi-modal transportation network with a traffic demand-based computational method

In the last decade, there has been an abundance of research on identifying critical nodes in single-modal transportation network, but less for multi-modal transportation network (MTN). In addition, none of them consider the effect of interactions between nodes in a transportation corridor on node importance. For this purpose, a modified weighted k-shell (MWKS) model is proposed for identifying the critical nodes of the MTN, which combines the network topology and traffic demand. It is modified by the differential contribution of the multi-order neighbor nodes embodied by the passenger volume and the transportation corridor idea. Then the effectiveness of MWKS is verified with an example of a real transportation system using susceptible-infected (SI) model and cascading failure model. The analysis proves that MWKS is suitable for identifying critical nodes in the MTN. Furthermore, the proposed contribution attenuation coefficient based on the idea of the transportation corridor outperforms the topology-based and constant. It demonstrates the necessity of capturing the difference in the contribution of each neighbor node based on traffic demand when calculating the node importance. The results can provide a research basis for traffic planning to improve network reliability.