Topological characteristics of the Dutch road infrastructure

Abstract

In this paper we study an example of a complex network, namely the road infrastructure of the Netherlands. In order to investigate the factors influencing the robustness of the complex network under consideration, we calculate a set of generic topological characteristics, related to the connectivity, degree, clustering and the shortest path length. Along with these widely considered topological characteristics, we also study the spectrum of the road graph, i.e. the collection of all eigenvalues of the assiciated adjacency matrix and the Laplacian matrix. The topological characteristics show that the road infrastructure differs substantially from many other real-world networks. However, there a complex structures, as for instance the power grid, that resemble topological properties of the Dutch road infrastructure.