Abnormal cascading dynamics in transportation networks based on Gaussian distribution of load

In the transportation network, we observe that the distance people travel by means of transportation follows a certain distribution. Statistical analysis shows that people’s travel distance is mainly concentrated in a medium range by the same vehicle, and they choose fewer destinations that are extremely close or far away. However, in previous studies, the impact of distance on the distribution of load flow within the network has often been neglected, or at best, addressed with overly simplistic assumptions. Therefore, we quantify the load flow distribution based on the Gaussian distribution of distances between the nodes. On this basis, a new cascading failure model is proposed using the shortest path strategy to calculate the initial load of the edge. Through the simulation of three real traffic networks and two artificially constructed networks with similar structural characteristics of traffic networks, we found the following interesting anomalies: First, increasing the load-bearing capacity of edges within the network does not necessarily lead to enhanced robustness. Second, we observed that removing more edges does not necessarily lead to a decrease in network robustness; conversely, the network robustness can be higher when a moderate number of edges are removed compared to fewer edges. To better understand the two anomalous dynamics phenomena we observed, we ran simulations on a small-scale network extracted from a real traffic network. We found that, under certain circumstances, the premature failure of some edges may isolate certain regions from the network, which may be responsible for this paradox.