Robustness of urban road networks based on spatial topological patterns

Abstract

During the last decade, road network vulnerability assessment has received an increasing attention. On one hand, it is due to the significant advances in Network Science and the potentialities that its tools offer. On the other hand, it is due to its utility for urban planning and emergency response. Despite these facts and the increasingly available data, related work is still sparse in Latin America, even more so in Ecuador. Due to its geographical, historical, and social characteristics, the city of Quito is considered as a case study. At first, the spatial distributions of several topological centrality measures are analyzed. As expected, there are hotspots where high values of these measures concentrate. These results serve to further simulate several strategies for disconnecting the urban road network. Finally, we observe that centrality-based strategies are more effective than randomly-based strategies in disconnecting the network.