Communications - Scientific letters of the University of Zilina X:X | DOI: 10.26552/com.C.2026.031

Detection of Transportation Network Elements Critical to Emergency Service Systems

Peter Czimmermann ORCID...*, Zuzana Borčinová ORCID...
University of Zilina, Faculty of Management Science and Informatics, Department of Mathematical Methods and Operations Research, Zilina, Slovakia

A study of the vulnerability of emergency service systems leads to the problem of detecting elements (vertices and edges) of transportation networks that are critical to the functionality of these systems. In this paper, methods for identifying the most critical edges and vertices in networks with respect to emergency service systems are presented, and these methods were tested on real data. The primary results of this work are the development and testing of two algorithms that compute a measure referred to as change in transportation performance for edges and vertices in the network. A method for identifying the edges and vertices that are the most critical to the designed emergency service system is presented. Experiments on the transportation network of the Zilina region highlight the importance of probabilistic models of travel time elongation, based on appropriate probability density functions.

Keywords: transportation network, critical edge, critical vertex, emergency service system, p-median
Grants and funding:

The work was supported in part by the Scientific Grant Agency of the Ministry of Education, Research, Development and Youth of the Slovak Republic under the projects VEGA 1/0220/25 „Regional equality in access to public rescue services provided from service centers on the transport network “ and VEGA 1/0696/26“Predictions of delays and vehicle occupancies to inform the planning of public transport“.

Conflicts of interest:

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Received: February 16, 2026; Accepted: April 14, 2026; Prepublished online: May 12, 2026 

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