Is the Boston subway a small-world network?

By Vito Latora, Massimo Marchiori. 2002

589 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The mathematical study of the small-world concept has fostered quite some interest, showing that small-world features can be identified for some abstract classes of networks. However, passing to real complex systems, as for instance transportation networks, shows a number of new problems that make current analysis impossible. In this paper we show how a more refined kind of analysis, relying on transportation efficiency, can in fact be used to overcome such problems, and to give precious insights on the general characteristics of real transportation networks, eventually providing a picture where the small-world comes back as underlying construction principle.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/44feadcc38412138e3a8c85c43075b151746c32a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Networks and Communications

1. Chen Zhao
2. Luciano da Fontoura Costa
3. P. R. Villas Boas
4. Francisco Aparecido Rodrigues
5. Gonzalo Travieso
6. Marc Barthelemy

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Marc Barthelemy

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

1. Francisco Aparecido Rodrigues
2. José J. Ramasco
3. Filippo Simini
4. Luciano da Fontoura Costa
5. P. R. Villas Boas
6. Gonzalo Travieso
7. Chen Zhao
8. Marc Barthelemy

Citations in the corpus

• Analysis of the Chinese Airline Network as multi-layer networks (2016, background): “applied to different transport methods, including urban traffic [4, 5], railway [6], subway [7, 8], and especially the air transport system [9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14].”
• Human mobility: Models and applications (2017, background): “5Center for Cancer Systems Biology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.”
• Spatial Networks (2010, background): “One of the first studies (after the WattsStrogatz paper) on the topology of a transportation network was proposed by Latora and Marchiori [207] who considered the Boston subway network.”
• Characterization of complex networks: A survey of measurements (2005, background): “optical fibers [58]. This kind of networks is called geographical or spatial networks. Other important examples of geographical networks are power grids [59, 60], airport networks [61, 62, 63], subway [64] and neural networks [65]. In geographical networks, the existence of a direct connection betwee”