Network system and accessibility in Erbil governorate

Abstract EN

The notion of transportation network refers to a network of roads, streets, railways or nearly any structure which permits either vehicular movement or flow of some commodity (Ahuja et al.

1995).

It is quite broadly known that transit systems can impact cities in many different aspects, from their economy and land-use activity to their liveability.

Network analysis remains one of the most important and persistent type of research and application areas in the area of geography of transportation (Curtin 2007).

Network analysis has a strong theoretical basis in the mathematical disciplines of graph theory and topology.

The application of graph theory to road transportation systems emerged in the late 1950s and lasted through the 1970s (Rodrigue, Comtois, and Slack 2017).

Measures such as the Beta, Alpha, and Gamma indices (Karl Kansky and Danscoine 1989) are used to measure the relative connectivity of a network by comparing the number of edges to the number of vertices (in the case of the Beta Index).

In addition, the accessibility of the GIS network system is another new significant approach developed in recent research studies which has been applied in the discipline of transportation geography.

This paper addresses the geographic characteristics of the network system in Erbil governorate in Kurdistan-Iraq based on new approaches which involve quantitative measures and GIS techniques such as the ArcGIS extension network analysis.