An improved network model for railway traffic.

In railway traffic, safety analysis is a key issue for controlling train operation. Here, the identification and order of key factors are very important. In this paper, a new network model is constructed for analyzing the railway safety, in which nodes are regarded as causation factors and links represent possible relationships among those factors. Our aim is to give all these nodes an importance order, and to find the in-depth relationship among these nodes including how failures spread among them. Based on the constructed network model, we propose a control method to ensure the safe state by setting each node a threshold. As the results, by protecting the Hub node of the constructed network, the spreading of railway accident can be controlled well. The efficiency of such a method is further tested with the help of numerical example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]