Robustness analysis metrics for worldwide airport network: A comprehensive study

Robustness of transportation networks is one of the major challenges of the 21st century. This paper investigates the resilience of global air transportation from a complex network point of view, with focus on attacking strategies in the airport network, i.e., to remove airports from the sys-tem and see what could affect the air traffic system from a passenger's perspective. Specifically, we identify commonalities and differences between several robustness measures and attacking strate-gies, proposing a novel notion of functional robustness: unaffected passengers with rerouting. We apply twelve attacking strategies to the worldwide airport network with three weights, and eval-uate three robustness measures. We find that degree and Bonacich based attacks harm passenger weighted network most. Our evaluation is geared toward a unified view on air transportation net-work attack and serves as a foundation on how to develop effective mitigation strategies.     

Percolation transition in temporal airport network

The air transportation system has a critical impact on the global economy. While the system reliability is essential for the operational management of air traffic, it remains challenging to understand the network reliability of the air transportation system. This paper focuses on how the global air traffic is integrated from local scale along with operational time. The integration process of air traffic into a temporally connected network is viewed as percolation process by increasing the integration time constantly. The critical integration time T_P which is found during the integration process can measure the global reliability of air traffic. The critical links at T_P are also identified, the delay of which will influence the global integration of the airport network. These findings may provide insights on the reliability management for the temporal airport network.     

Vulnerability analysis of the Chinese coupled aviation and high-speed railway network

The integrated aviation and High-Speed Railway (HSR) transportation system plays a vital role for today’s inter-city transportation services. However, an increasing number of unexpected disruptions (such as operation failures, natural disasters, or intentional attacks) pose a considerable threat to the normal operation of the system, especially on ground transfer, leading to the extensive research on its vulnerability. Previous approaches mainly focus on interruptions within a single transportation mode, neglecting the role of ground transfer which serves as a coupled connection between aviation and High-Speed Railway. This paper proposes a network-based framework for evaluating the vulnerability of the Chinese Coupled Aviation and High-Speed Railway (CAHSR) network from the viewpoint of ground transfer interruption. Taking the end-to-end travel time and passenger flow information into consideration as an evaluation measure and analyzing from the perspective of urban agglomerations, an adaptive method is developed to identify the critical cities and further investigate their failure impacts on the geographic distribution of vulnerability. In addition, the proposed model explores variations of vulnerability under different failure time intervals. Based on the empirical study, some major conclusions are highlighted as follows: (A) Only a few cities show significant impacts on the network’s vulnerability when ground transfer interruptions occurred. (B) The distribution of vulnerability is not proportional to the distance between failure city and influenced city. (C) The vulnerability is more serious in the morning and evening when the ground transfer is disconnected. Our findings may provide new insights for maintenance and optimization of the CAHSR network and other real-world transportation networks.     

Empirical analysis of airport network and critical airports

Air transport network, or airport network, is a complex network involving numerous airports. Effective management of the air transport system requires an in-depth understanding of the roles of airports in the network. Whereas knowledge on air transport network properties has been improved greatly, methods to find critical airports in the network are still lacking. In this paper, we present methods to investigate network properties and to identify critical airports in the network. A novel network model is proposed with airports as nodes and the correlations between traffic flow of airports as edges. Spectral clustering algorithm is developed to classify airports. Spatial distribution characteristics and intraclass correlation of different categories of airports are carefully analyzed. The analyses based on the fluctuation trend of distance-correlation and power spectrum of time series are performed to examine the self-organized criticality of the network. The results indicate that there is one category of airports which dominates the self-organized critical state of the network. Six airports in this category are found to be the most important ones in the Chinese air transport network. The flights delay occurred in these six airports can propagate to the other airports, having huge impact on the operation characteristics of the entire network. The methods proposed here taking traffic dynamics into account are capable of identifying critical airports in the whole air transport network.     

Dynamics of air transport networks: A review from a complex systems perspective

Air transport systems are highly dynamic at temporal scales from minutes to years. This dynamic behavior not only characterizes the evolution of the system but also affect the system's functioning. Understanding the evolutionary mechanisms is thus fundamental in order to better design optimal air transport networks that benefits companies, passengers and the environment. In this review, we briefly present and discuss the state-of-the-art on time-evolving air transport net-works. We distinguish the structural analysis of sequences of network snapshots, ideal for long-term network evolution (e.g. annual evolution), and temporal paths, preferred for short-term dynamics (e.g. hourly evolution). We emphasize that most previous research focused on the first modeling approach (i.e. long-term) whereas only a few studies look at high-resolution temporal paths. We conclude the review highlighting that much research remains to be done, both to apply already available methods and to develop new measures for temporal paths on air transport networks. In particular, we identify that the study of delays, network resilience and optimization of resources (aircraft and crew) are critical topics.     

Measuring the resilience of an airport network

Resilience is the ability of a system to withstand and stay operational in the face of an unexpected disturbance or unpredicted changes. Recent studies on air transport system resilience focus on topology characteristics after the disturbance and measure the robustness of the network with respect to connectivity. The dynamic processes occurring at the node and link levels are often ignored. Here we analyze airport network resilience by considering both structural and dynamical aspects. We develop a simulation model to study the operational performance of the air transport system when airports operate at degraded capacity rather than completely shutting down. Our analyses show that the system deteriorates soon after disruptive events occur but returns to an acceptable level after a period of time. Static resilience of the airport network is captured by a phase transition in which a small change to airport capacity will result in a sharp change in system punctuality. After the phase transition point, decreasing airport capacity has little impact on system performance. Critical airports which have significant influence on the performance of whole system are identified, and we find that some of these cannot be detected based on the analysis of network structural indicators alone. Our work shows that air transport system’s resilience can be well understood by combining network science and operational dynamics.     

基于航空货运网络结构的城市层级分析

航空货运网络是影响城市层级结构的重要因素之一,对其进行量化分析具有十分重要的理论和现实意义。根据2002—2008年中国航空货运数据库构建的中国航空货运网络,运用复杂网络分析的测度方法,以城市航空货运量比例为依据,将中国航空货运网络分成初始层级网络、中级层级网络和核心层级网络3个层次。基于航空货运网络视角,将中国通航城市分成核心、中级和边缘城市3类层级。通过对平均路径长度、聚类系数、度分布、密度等网络特征的分析,证明了3个层级城市所在的网络都具有小世界和无标度特性,研究表明中国城市层级结构具有金字塔特性,分布严重不均匀,值得关注。     

基于蒙特卡罗法的航空发动机空气系统稳态算法优化

针对目前航空发动机空气系统稳态算法中收敛性依赖初值的问题,将蒙特卡罗方法与流体网络法综合应用到空气系统可压缩流体一维网络计算中,提出了一种新的计算方法Monte Carlo-Fluid Network（MC-FN）。该方法将空气系统简化为由节点和元件组成的网络,借助蒙特卡罗方法获得空气系统内各节点压力分配,再根据空气系统中各元件流阻特性和换热特性计算流量、温度。计算中通过将游动次数比较少的蒙特卡罗方法的计算结果作为流量残差法节点压力、温度的初始值,实现快速求得精确收敛解。与流量残差算法相比,MC-FN方法计算精度不变,收敛速度提升了66.5%;与线性求解法相比,MC-FN方法的计算精度提升了25.2%,收敛速度提升了43.8%。     

Analyzing the multilevel structure of the European airport network

The multilayered structure of the European airport network (EAN), composed of con-nections and flights between European cities, is analyzed through the k-core decomposition of the connections network. This decomposition allows to identify the core, bridge and periphery lay-ers of the EAN. The core layer includes the best-connected cities, which include important business air traffic destinations. The periphery layer includes cities with lesser connections, which serve low populated areas where air travel is an economic alternative. The remaining cities form the bridge of the EAN, including important leisure travel origins and destinations. The multilayered structure of the EAN affects network robustness, as the EAN is more robust to isolation of nodes of the core, than to the isolation of a combination of core and bridge nodes.     

Evolution of airports from a network perspective——An analytical concept

Analyzing airports' role in global air transportation and monitoring their development over time provides an additional perspective on the dynamics of network evolution. In order to understand the different roles airports can play in the network an integrated and multi-dimensional approach is needed. Therefore, an approach to airport classification through hierarchi-cal clustering considering several parameters from network theory is presented in this paper. By applying a 29 year record of global flight data and calculating the conditional transition probabil-ities the results are displayed as an evolution graph similar to a discrete-time Markov chain. With this analytical concept the meaning of airports is analyzed from a network perspective and a new airport taxonomy is established. The presented methodology allows tracking the development of airports from certain categories into others over time. Results show that airports of equal classes run through similar stages of development with a limited number of alternatives, indicating clear evolutionary patterns. Apart from giving an overview of the results the paper illustrates the exact data-driven approach and suggests an evaluation scheme. The methodology can help the public and industry sector to make informed strategy decisions when it comes to air transportation infras-tructure.