Title: Congestion Barcodes: Exploring the Topology of Urban Congestion Using Persistent Homology,
Abstract: This work presents a new method to quantify connectivity in transportation
networks. Inspired by the field of topological data analysis, we propose a
novel approach to explore the robustness of road network connectivity in the
presence of congestion on the roadway. The robustness of the pattern is
summarized in a congestion barcode, which can be constructed directly from
traffic datasets commonly used for navigation. As an initial demonstration, we
illustrate the main technique on a publicly available traffic dataset in a
neighborhood in New York City.