Vulnerability assessment is of great significance to highway traffic system. As the widespread cascading failure may cause serious damage, factor identification is necessary to improve the security level of highway system. In this paper, the Dematel method is applied to identify the vulnerability priorities of important factors, and a new assessment method for highway system vulnerability is presented by considering system cascading failure. The traffic allocation and reallocation are then optimized under user equilibrium assignment model in different scenarios. Finally, the methodology is applied to the Heilongjiang highway network and the results shows that vulnerable sections in highway networks can be determined efficiently in our proposed process.

Hydrogen has been advocated as a promising energy carrier for railway systems, but its limited energy density may introduce mileage anxiety into the transportation system. Motivated by nonstop power exchange design, this article proposes a novel facility planning model under energy transfer conditions and natural endowments, such as photovoltaic resources in geographical locations, to optimize the overall system benefit. The supply, consumption, and replenishment mechanisms of multienergy forms (hydrogen energy, photovoltaic, electric energy) are designed on both vehicle and ground sides of the power exchange system. The optimal facility location and allocation of photovoltaic hydrogen plants, movable tank shifting devices, and train cars are collaboratively decided. A Lhasa–Xining railway case study is applied by conducting sensitivity analyses on significant parameters. Various insights hold the promise to promote policies and strategies for integrating transportation and power systems in a real-world application. It is demonstrated that energy cost reduction, solar power generation improvement, and energy-carrier capacity expansion help solve the mileage anxiety problem in nonstop power exchange systems.

The social force model has been widely used in simulating and analyzing pedestrian behavior. Like any agent-based models, the fidelity of the social force model largely relies on its numerical parameters that characterizes pedestrians’ behaviors. While parameters describing normal walking behaviors have been observed and calibrated in field experiments, those describing behaviors under abnormal and urgent circumstances have rarely been studied but are of practical significance in evaluating safety functionality of facilities, particularly those serving children or elders. Specifically aiming at providing a set of social force model parameters characterizing children’s behavior during evacuation, this study conducted evacuation experiments with preschool children under multiple emergency scenarios involving impaired-vision and flame scenarios and benchmarked against a normal scenario. A simulation-calibration framework is developed based on the social force model to calibrate evacuation behavior parameters by minimizing trajectory distance. The numerical approximation results indicate evident parameter disparities of preschool children from adults. This study can improve evacuation strategies and the designing/evaluation process of dedicated facilities layouts such as kindergarten corridors, activity rooms, and playgrounds.

As a useful descriptive tool for emergency service effectiveness, the hypercube queuing model has been applied in systems of many countries, such as the SAMU system in Brazil. However, the traditional hypercube queuing model and its extended forms assume that the service provider performs independent services, lacking a compelling description of the situation where emergency vehicles perform cooperative services (e.g., NEPPHE in China). To this end, we assume that vehicles in the same fleet simultaneously start and end services and propose a cooperative hypercube queuing (CHQ) model that can describe the state of emergency systems which apply multivehicle dispatches. In order to verify the accuracy of the model, we apply Arena simulation software in Wuhan case. The results show that the CHQ model can illustrate cooperative performance effectively. Sensitivity analyses under more general parameters are conducted to reveal insights into the model application.