A Cascading Failure Model of Rail Transit Based on Application Cell

Rail transit system deliver its application by transporting passengers to their destination. Succeed or not of application’s delivery greatly affects the daily operation of it. Current research based on cascading failure mainly focus on the connectivity of network. Researches based on queuing theory, network calculus and BPR function focus on the performance of network. They all take transport process as homogeneous flow and consider the function-based or performance-based structure of network, ignoring that they essentially are applications with multiattributes (such as application classes, application process and so on), and these attributes have great impact on rail transit, which leads that current researches are unable to reflect the reliability from users’ aspects. In this paper, we focus on the cascading failure process of rail transit, one call request of rail transit from a certain passenger is treated as one application. In order to map the features of application, we describe them as application cells, and multiattributes of transport process corresponds to the characteristics of cells. Then, the deliver process of application can be regarded as the interaction among cells in our model. The results of simulation show that our model can effectively depict the process of cascading failure among cells and can help to simplify the complexity of application process. Besides, we find the law that even holding the same amount of burst traffic flow, different application types have various cascading process and totally different network reliability.