Detection of Transportation Network Elements Critical to Emergency Service Systems

A study of the vulnerability of emergency service systems leads to the problem of detecting elements (vertices and edges) of transportation networks that are critical to the functionality of these systems. In this paper, methods for identifying the most critical edges and vertices in networks with respect to emergency service systems are presented, and these methods were tested on real data. The primary results of this work are the development and testing of two algorithms that compute a measure referred to as change in transportation performance for edges and vertices in the network. A method for identifying the edges and vertices that are the most critical to the designed emergency service system is presented. Experiments on the transportation network of the Zilina region highlight the importance of probabilistic models of travel time elongation, based on appropriate probability density functions.