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.