Critical Percolation on Temporal High-Speed Railway Networks

Deeply understanding the dynamic operating characteristics of high-speed railway (HSR) systems is of essential significance in theory and practice for the planning, construction, and operational management of HSR systems. In this paper, the HSR system is described as a temporal network, and the evolution of connected clusters in the system is considered as a percolation process. The critical integration time T-c of the percolation process can determine the formation of a globally connected cluster and measure the transport performance of the HSR system. The appearance time of critical edges identified at T-c can significantly affect the reliability of the transport performance of an HSR system. Compared to random percolation in the static HSR network, it can be found that the critical fraction pc of the percolation process in a temporal HSR network is almost always larger. This indicates that the global connectivity and the transport performance of HSR systems is overestimated by the static network abstraction. This paper provides a promising way of understanding the dynamic characteristics of HSR systems, evaluating their transport performance, and improving their reliability.