Resilience Modeling Method of Airport Network Affected by Global Public Health Events

Abstract

The COVID-19 global pandemic hit the aviation industry hard since the end of 2019. It has had an immediate, dramatic impact on airport traffic and revenue. Airports are the important nodes in the aviation system network, and the failure of a single airport can often affect the surrounding airports. The purpose of our analysis is to show how is the resilience and recovery of airports in the global public health crisis. Much research on resilience can be found in air transportation networks facing natural hazards or extreme weather, which focus on the robustness of the airport network. These methods are not suitable for the global public health event. Therefore, based on the collection of existing data, we combined with existing resilience measurement methods to analyze the resilience and recovery of airports during the global public health crisis. The resilience metrics results reflect the recovery of airports very well under different strategies. Here, we analyze airport network resilience by considering the performance-based methods. We integrate some metrics such as aircraft movements, passenger throughput, and freight throughput in the resilience metrics model, comparing the resilience evaluation under different preventive and control strategies, which can reflect the airport’s recovery speed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis indicates that the aviation system network deteriorates soon after the COVID-19 outbreak, but the recovery level of the aviation industry depends on what measures are taken to prevent and control the COVID-19 epidemic. In particular, the recovery of the aviation system network in Europe takes longer than in China, due to different prevention and control strategies for COVID-19. The study proves that the emergency response ability of the country for the public health crisis has a significant positive impact on speeding up the recovery of the aviation system.