Copyright © 2012 Yong-Sheng Qian et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Based on the research progress in related fields and the distribution characteristics of road networks in valley cities, the complex network model of a city road network is established to study its connectivity reliability. Taking Lanzhou as the example, several parameters of the complex network abstracted from the road network are calculated and the practical meanings of them are described, respectively. On this basis, through computing the global efficiency and the relative size of the largest connecting subgraph under intentional attacks and random attacks, respectively, the curves of the above two parameters varying with the attacking times are drawn. The detailed investigation of connectivity reliability of Lanzhou road network is done by analyzing the curves’ tendency. Finally, we find that the network of a valley city has a poor connection and has a lot of dead ends. Besides, the average length of the roads is very long and the holistic connectivity reliability is at a lower level; these are suitable to the group-type distribution of valley city’s road network, and the connectivity reliability of the road network is stronger under random attacks than that under intentional attacks.