Seismic resilience assessment of urban rail transit network affected by the operational modes

Abstract

Urban rail transit (URT) networks are vital to metropolitan mobility, and their performance under seismic hazards is crucial for urban resilience. In daily operations of URT, the section-based mode, involving partial services across fewer stations, is commonly adopted to meet the spatial variation of ridership at different stations and to address station closures during abnormal disruptions. However, existing studies on URT network performance under natural hazards usually overlook this operational mode, leading to biased assessments of both network performance and resilience. This study develops a multi-dimensional seismic resilience model that integrates network topology and ridership to reveal the effect of operational modes on URT performance. Seismic damage scenarios for stations, tunnels and bridges are generated using probabilistic fragility models and Monte Carlo simulations based on Latin Hypercube sampling. The model accounts for three operational modes of URT lines, namely component-based, section-based and line-based modes, and is implemented in a seismic resilience evaluation of the Beijing URT network. Results show that operational modes significantly impact URT performance with performance variation of up to 74.27%. Moreover, suburban stations are more vulnerable, and resilience indicator dispersion varies greatly across operational modes.