Introduction

Human activities take place on a spatial matrix largely defined by three types of
transportation networks. These involve matter (streets, roads, highways, railways,
and airport networks), energy (the power grid) and information (Internet,
telephone networks). One of the oldest human-made webs is the city. At a lower
scale, whether in parts of a large modern city or in smaller settlements,
decentralized growth of human settlements, then the street networks are
observed throughout the whole history of the city. Many of these networks do
not result from a planning process; rather they emerge or evolve in an
incremental way through a physical process involving local aggregation rule or
demand. It follows that in many cases, the resulting topologies are complex and
deviate from simple regular patterns such as square-grids. The common traits of
such street networks are largely unknown and their quantitative description is
lacking.

As discussed by some authors, two key requirements need to be fulfilled in road
networks, namely avoid large detours and reduce the cost, which are assumed
proportional to the length of the paths. Using Boltzmann and Darwinian
strategies, optimal solutions can be found. Such methods deal with global energy
functions, and require solving a class of frustrated optimization problems. Not
surprisingly, the optimal networks are somewhere located between two extreme
situations. A different approach, which we take here, is to explore the topological
organization of street networks as a static object. Such an approach is of value in
those cases where no evidence for a planned building is at work (and thus no
global optimization is involved). In this case, the network is the result of local
decisions performed by a distributed set of individuals who made their decisions
based on multiple constraints, not necessarily associated to global detour lengths
or efficient traffic.

In this paper, we make use of graph theory as a powerful tool to characterize and
determine the topological properties of street network of non-planned
settlements of Kavre district.





Image of Road Network: Kavre


Equivalent representation of the network:
























LEGEND
Branch Link
Node (Important place)
Scheer Memorial
Hospital
Naya Basti
Tribhuvan Chowk
Spinal
Injury Child
Hospital
Kathmandu
University
Dhulikhel
IT Park
Bansdol
Panauti Bus Park
/ Malpi College
5.95
2.44
1.03
0.58
4.25
2
1.79
1.54
1.18
4.34
4.11
Data of Street Network

We have the network road of Kavre District extracted from the google earth. The
selected network encompasses the obligatory points as settlement areas,
hospitals, academic centers and bus parks, i.e the edges and nodes correspond
exclusively to public spaces. The main characteristics of the network, number of
nodes n, mean degree k, average path length and assortativity coefficient T are
shown in table.


Topological Patterns and Analysis
Street networks can be described by an embedded planar graph G = (V,E) where
V = {(vi,xi, yi), (i = 1, . . . ,n)} is the set of n nodes characterized by their (x, y)
position and diameter, and E = {(v
i
, v
j
)} the set of m edges/connections between
nodes and characterized by their length d
ij
. The edges correspond to sub-sections
of streets connecting two nodes. The nodes correspond to the squares, the
intersections between streets and their dead ends.
The three topological measures are namely degree, path length and clustering
coefficient are briefly describe here. For a vertex or node, its degree is the
number of other vertices directly connected to it. The average of degree of all
individual nodes is that of the graph. Formally it is defined by:

Path length of a graph is to measure how compact a graph is. For a graph, if every
vertex is connected to every other, then it is very compact, thus the smallest path





Node
No. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Node Name
Tribhuwan
Chowk
Nayabasti
Sheer
Memorial
Spinal
Injury
Dhulikhel Bansdol
KTM
Universtiy
IT Park
Panauti
Buspark

(d
Eucl
/dij)
E
dij - 1.03 0.58 2.44 3.79 5.95 2 1.54 5.88
d
Eucl
- 0.93 0.5 1.15 2.9 3.57 1.77 1.42 4.88
d
Eucl
/dij 0.9029126 0.47131 0.765172 0.6 0.885 0.922078 0.829932 5.376 0.075
dij 1.03 - 1.61 3.47 4.82 6.98 3.03 2.57 6.91
d
Eucl
0.93 - 1.03 0.83 3.87 3.38 2.69 2.23 5.38
d
Eucl
/dij 0.9029126 0.23919 0.802905 0.48424 0.88778878 0.867704 0.778582 4.963 0.069
dij 0.58 1.61 - 3.02 4.37 6.53 2.58 2.12 6.46
d
Eucl
0.5 1.03 - 1.55 2.92 4.05 1.91 1.77 5.31
d
Eucl
/dij 0.862069 0.6397516 0.51325 0.668192 0.62021 0.74031008 0.834906 0.821981 5.701 0.079
dij 2.44 3.47 3.02 - 6.23 8.39 4.44 3.98 8.32
d
Eucl
1.15 0.83 1.55 - 3.91 2.59 2.77 2.01 4.66
d
Eucl
/dij 0.4713115 0.2391931 0.513245 0.627608 0.3087 0.62387387 0.505025 0.560096 3.849 0.053
dij 3.79 4.82 4.37 6.23 - 9.74 1.79 2.97 7.31
d
Eucl
2.9 3.87 2.92 3.91 - 5.6 1.24 2.21 4.92
d
Eucl
/dij 0.7651715 0.8029046 0.6681922 0.62761 0.57495 0.69273743 0.744108 0.673051 5.549 0.077
dij 5.95 6.98 6.53 8.39 9.74 - 7.95 7.49 4.11
d
Eucl
3.57 3.38 4.05 2.59 5.6 - 4.43 3.45 3.47
d
Eucl
/dij 0.6 0.4842407 0.6202144 0.3087 0.574949 0.5572327 0.460614 0.844282 4.450 0.062
dij 2 3.03 2.58 4.44 1.79 7.95 - 1.18 5.52
d
Eucl
1.77 2.69 1.91 2.77 1.24 4.43 - 1.01 4.32
d
Eucl
/dij 0.885 0.8877888 0.7403101 0.62387 0.692737 0.55723 0.855932 0.782609 6.025 0.084
dij 1.54 2.57 2.12 3.98 2.97 7.49 1.18 - 4.34
d
Eucl
1.42 2.23 1.77 2.01 2.21 3.45 1.01 - 3.66
d
Eucl
/dij 0.9220779 0.8677043 0.8349057 0.50503 0.744108 0.46061 0.8559322 0.843318 6.034 0.084
dij 5.88 6.91 6.46 8.32 7.31 4.11 5.52 4.34 -
d
Eucl
4.88 5.38 5.31 4.66 4.92 3.47 4.32 3.66 -
d
Eucl
/dij 0.829932 0.7785818 0.8219814 0.5601 0.673051 0.84428 0.7826087 0.843318 6.134 0.085
Sum 48.081 0.668
Table 2
5
6
7
8
9
Dhulikhel
Bansdol
KTM
Universtiy
IT Park
Panauti
Buspark
Tribhuwan
Chowk
1
2
3
4
Nayabasti
Sheer
Memorial
Spinal Injury

length. On the other hand, if all the vertices are connected as a linear chain, then
it is organized in a very loose way with the largest path length. Formally path
length is defined as:

where d(i, j) denotes the distance between two vertices i and j , which is the
minimum length of the paths that connect the two vertices, i.e., the length of a
graph geodesic. This can be determined through the procedures any shortest path
problem.

Clustering coefficient is to measure the clustering degree of a graph. It is the
probability that two neighbors of a given node are linked together, i.e., a ratio of
the number of actual edges to that of possible edges. The average clustering
coefficient of individual vertices is that of their graph, i.e.,
c(G) =

Degree correlations
Another important quantity of a network is the correlation between the degree of
connected vertices. In fact, it may happen either that high-degree nodes are
preferentially attached to other high-degree nodes, or that they are connected to
the low-degree ones. Degree correlations were estimated by calculating the
assortativity coefficient as proposed by Newman. It is defined as:

where j
i
and k
i
are the degrees of the vertices at the ends of the i
th
edge, with i =
1, . . . , m, c = 1/m and m being the number of edges. When T = 0, nodes are
connected independently from their neighbor degree. T >0 indicate an assortative
network where nodes with a given degree connect preferentially with nodes
having similar degrees, while T <0 corresponds to disassortative networks where
nodes connect preferentially with nodes having a different degree to them.


Network efficiency
The efficiency(E) of a network represents the efficiency of flow within the
network, namely how easily it is to get from one node to another. The local
measure of efficiency, for a pair of nodes I and j, is the ratio of the Euclidean
distance d
ij
Eucl
to the distance along the shortest path through the network d
ij
.
The global efficiency of the network is the average value of efficiency for every
pair of nodes, and is given by the formula:



Network Robustness
Beyond the efficiency associated to a given network topology, an additional and
complementary approach is the analysis of fragility against random failures. For
road networks, failures can consist in streets interrupted by landslides, floods,
crumbled buildings, or by more temporary events such as demonstrations.
The robustness of a network is measured by studying how it becomes fragmented
as a fraction of nodes is removed. The network fragmentation is usually measured
as the fraction of nodes contained by the largest connected component.
Fragmentation
The degree of fragmentation F of the network is defined as the ratio between the
numbers of pairs of nodes that are not connected in the fragmented network to
the possible number of pairs in the original fully connected network. Suppose
there are m clusters in the fragmented network, since all members of a cluster
are, by definition, mutually reachable, the measure F can be written as follows

Here, N
j
is the number of nodes in cluster j, m is number of clusters in the
fragmented network, and N the number of nodes in the original fully connected
network. For an undamaged network, F = 0. For a totally fragmented network, F =
1. The quantity C defined in the equation can be regarded as the connectivity of
the network. When C = 1 the network is fully connected while for C = 0 it is fully
fragmented.
The problem is defined as finding the statistical properties of the fragmented
networks after removing nodes (or links) from the original fully connected
network using a certain strategy. Many different removal strategies have been
developed for various purposes, e.g., mimicking the real world network failures,
improving the effectiveness of network disintegration, etc. Examples include
random removal (RR) strategy, the high degree removal (HDR) strategy and the
high centrality removal strategy. Given their spatially extended character and
decentralized origins, the removal of high degree nodes has an important impact
on network reliability, hence the robustness. Conversely, removal of low degree
nodes has little effects.


Results and Discussions
The value of cluster coefficient, 0.233 shows that network is not clustered or
many of this network nodes are not common. It depicts that the links between
nodes are minimum. Assortativity coefficient is less than zero (-0.55) means that
nodes connect preferentially with nodes having a different degree to them, which
is as expected for our network. Global efficiency of network is calculated to be
0.668, i.e about 67% is efficient. Node 1 has high degree or more specifically node
1 t has high betweenness centrality. If this node is removed, the degree of
fragmentation of network, is 0.722 and when other nodes are removed is 0.222.
This suggest the network is more vulnerable if node 1 has any disruptions or this
node has serious impact on network reliability. While the removal of other nodes
have not such significance. Thus corrective measures may be taken to enhance
the robustness of the transport system. These measures include the introduction
of a certain redundancy or spare capacity into the system and minimize the
interdependency of system components or link. Here it is to make node 1 free
from disturbance and build its alternative routes.
Further works
Here network topological patterns are determined and its efficiencies and
reliability is analyzed through static indicators. However reliability and robustness
of road network shall be analyzed by road features such as road traffic capacity,
traffic volume, travel time, cost and dynamic characteristics of traffic flow such as
difference of traffic volume in each links, sudden change in demand or supply,
sudden disruption, accidents etc, behavior of drivers etc.




References
www.kuleuven.be/traffic/dwn/P2004F.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assortativity
borgatti - NAS - The Key Player Problem 3
B. Jiang, 2007. A topological pattern of urban street networks: universality and peculiarity. Phys.
A. 384, 647655.