Model for the growth of the world airline network

Abstract

We propose a probabilistic growth model for transport networks which employs a balance between popularity of nodes and the physical distance between nodes. By comparing the degree of each node in the model network and the World Airline Network (WAN), we observe that the difference between the two is minimized for [Formula: see text]. Interestingly, this is the value obtained for the node–node correlation function in the WAN. This suggests that our model explains quite well the growth of airline networks.