Metro emergency resource distribution model

A novel station-level vulnerability algorithm that takes both passenger flow and network topology into account to reveal critical stations in a metro network is proposed. A vulnerability-based emergency resource distribution model (V-ERDM) is proposed in which a given metro station's vulnerability is measured by a combined index of network topology and passenger demand. The paper compares the proposed V-ERDM with a coverage-oriented model (i.e. a similar model without the vulnerability measure) to evaluate its performance. The models were implemented on two Chinese metro networks (Shaoxing and Shanghai), and these applications validated the feasibility of the proposed models. The unique contributions of this work are two-fold: network vulnerability in a metro system based on the characteristics of the metro network is proposed and the paper introduces a vulnerability index into the emergency resource distribution problem.