Revealing the component structure of the world air transportation network

Issa Moussa Diop,Chantal Cherifi,Cherif Diallo,Hocine Cherifi

doi:10.1007/s41109-021-00430-2

Issa Moussa Diop, Chantal Cherifi + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-021-00430-2

Copy DOI

Abstract

Air transportation plays an essential role in the global economy. Therefore, there is a great deal of work to understand better the complex network formed by the links between the origins and destinations of flights. Some investigations show that the world air transportation network exhibits a community and a core-periphery structure. Although precious, these representations do not distinguish the inter-regional (global) web of connections from the regional (local) one. Therefore, we propose a new mesoscopic model called the component structure that decomposes the network into local and global components. Local components are the dense areas of the network, and global components are the nodes and links bridging the local components. As a case study, we consider the unweighted and undirected world air transportation network. Experiments show that it contains seven large local components and multiple small ones spatially well-defined. Moreover, it has a main global component covering the world. We perform an extensive comparative analysis of the structure of the components. Results demonstrate the non-homogeneous nature of the world air transportation network. The local components structure highlights regional differences, and the global component organization captures the efficiency of inter-regional travel. Centrality analysis of the components allows distinguishing airports centered on regional destinations from those focused on inter-regional exchanges. Core analysis is more accurate in the components than in the whole network where Europe dominates, blurring the rest of the world. Besides the world air transportation network, this paper demonstrates the potential of the component decomposition for modeling and analyzing the mesoscale structure of networks.

Highlights

Air transport plays an essential role in the current context of globalization by reducing the distance between countries
Whether it is for the movement of millions of people or goods, thousands of flights are made per day, impacting the global economy and even public health (Colizza et al 2006)
Inspired by the works reported in Ghalmane et al (2019), Guimera et al (2005), we propose a new mesoscopic representation of a network, called the component structure

Summary

Introduction

Air transport plays an essential role in the current context of globalization by reducing the distance between countries. Local component structure of the world air transportation network This section reports a comparative analysis of the macroscopic topological properties of the local components To this end, we use the community structure uncovered by the Louvain algorithm to extract the components. Global component structure of the world air transportation network The global components contain the airports serving destinations outside their local components through their inter-regional links. Basic macroscopic topological properties The diameter of the global component indicates that one needs a maximum of eight hops to join two airports It is one flight more than in the North-Central America-Caribbean and East-Southeast Asia large local components, and two more flights compared with the local component of Europe. This process allows us to highlight the differences between these three levels of analysis

G G A F Montoro Sao Paulo

Findings

Conclusion