Centrality Analysis of a City Road Network

When modeling equilibrium network flows, it is useful to know vertex centralities. Centrality characterizes the extent to which a vertex of the graph is close to its structural “center.” Such a characteristic is a real-valued function on the set of vertices and expresses the potential importance of the vertex in terms of the structural properties of the graph, allowing the ranking of the vertices. Centrality is a powerful tool for graph analysis. In this paper we use centrality measures to analyze the road network of a city, on the example of Petrozavodsk. We describe the methods used to construct and enrich the road graph, our approach to centrality-based analysis and the results of numerical experiments. The results show that centrality analysis can be useful for road structure analysis and planning of the road structure development.