A Method to Optimize Routing Paths for City-Pair Airlines on Three-Layer Air Transport Networks

Abstract

Air transportation is a huge, complex system with emergence and self-organization, which makes it important for it to be modelled. In this paper, to model the air transportation system with more accuracy, from physical facilities to traffic applications, three-layer networks, including the air route network, the city-pair airline network, and flight operation network, are built, where the air route network is regarded as the physical layer, and city-pair airline network and flight operation network are the application layers. Furthermore, a powerful tool, complex network theory, is applied to discuss the topology characteristics of the three-layer networks. Moreover, considering the path diversity of city-pair airlines, a simulated annealing-based framework is proposed to optimize the routing paths on an air route network for each city-pair airline, such that the traffic congestion of the air route network can be alleviated, where an elaborated method for perturbing solutions, named Selection after Remove (SAR), is adopted. Experimental results show that, compared with the default routing paths, the shortest routing paths, and the random routing paths, the proposed routing-path optimization strategy can reduce the maximum traffic flows of the air route network by 2.4%, 4.6%, and 4.8%, respectively, which shows that the proposed optimization method performs well in alleviating the traffic congestion of the air route network.