Static and Dynamic Complexity Analysis of Urban Public Transportation Network: A Case in Shanghai

Urban public transportation system is a complex network composed of stations and public transportation lines. The geometric characteristics of the network have an important effect on the conditions of the public transportation of a city. In this paper, based on the computation of the degree distribution, average path length, and clustering coefficient, static complex characteristics of the public transportation system of Shanghai are studied. And also, error and attack tolerance of the network are also studied. The result indicates that the degree distribution of the network follows a power law distribution, and the public transportation network of the city is a network with short average path length and high clustering coefficient. And, the network displays a surprising degree of tolerance against errors. However, error tolerance comes at a high price in that the transportation network is extremely vulnerable to attacks. It can be seen that the network is a scale free network.