Efficient Identification of Critical Links Based on Reachability Under the Presence of Time Constraint.

In this paper, we focus on an emergency situation in the real-world such as disaster evacuation and propose an algorithm that can efficiently identify critical links in a spatial network that substantially degrade network performance if they fail to function. For that purpose, we quantify the network performance by node reachability from/to one of target facilities within the prespecified time limitation, which corresponds to the number of people who can safely evacuate in a disaster. Using a real-world road network and geographical information of actual facilities, we demonstrated that the proposed method is much more efficient than the method based on the betweenness centrality that is one of the representative centrality measures and that the critical links detected by our method cannot be identified by using a straightforward extension of the betweenness centrality.