Modeling Airport Congestion Contagion by SIS Epidemic Spreading on Airline Networks

Abstract

We model airport congestion contagion as an SIS spreading process on an airport transportation network to explain airport vulnerability. The vulnerability of each airport is derived from the US Airport Network data as its congestion probability. We construct three types of airline networks to capture diverse features such as the frequency and duration of flights. The weight of each link augments its infection rate in SIS spreading process. The nodal infection probability in the meta-stable state is used as estimate the vulnerability of the corresponding airport. We illustrate that our model could reasonably capture the distribution of nodal vulnerability and rank airports in vulnerability evidently better than the random ranking, but not significantly better than using nodal network properties. Such congestion contagion model not only allows the identification of vulnerable airports but also opens the possibility to reduce global congestion via congestion reduction in few airports.