Analysis of Transportation Network Vulnerability and Resilience within an Urban Agglomeration: Case Study of the Greater Bay Area, China

Recently, urban agglomerations have become the main platform of China's economic development. As one of those, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) has an important strategic position in national blueprints. Its amazing achievement is inseparable from reliable and resilient transportation networks. With the aim of improving the sustainability of the GBA, this paper presents a novel view of vulnerability and resilience of integrated transportation networks within an urban agglomeration. According to complex network theory, the integrated transportation network model of the GBA was established. Various scenarios were considered to improve the overall level of defensive ability, including random failures, targeted attacks and natural hazards. Vulnerability and resilience assessment models were developed to investigate the influences on the whole network. Finally, a simulation analysis was conducted on the GBA to examine the variations in network performance when faced with different attack scenarios. The results indicate that the transportation network of the GBA is more vulnerable and has less resilience to targeted attacks, while natural hazards had little influence on the performance, to a certain extent. Moreover, the betweenness recovery strategy seemed to be the best choice for every attack scenario.