Robustness of the Weighted World Air Transportation Network Components

Abstract

The air transportation network is a critical infrastructure in our connected world. Therefore, understanding its robustness to targeted attacks is essential. Extensive research has investigated how removing a particular class of nodes impacts connectivity, efficiency, and security. However, the impact of its mesoscopic structuration remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we investigate how targeted attacks on the global weighted air transport network impact its components in this study. Indeed, the weighted world air transportation network includes five local components covering different regions (North America-Caribbean, Europe-Russia, East and Southeast Asia-Oceania, Africa-Middle East-South Asia, South America) and a global component scattered around the world. We study and compare two prevalent attacks (weighted Closeness and weighted Eigenvector). The results show that as the percentage of airports removed increases, the local components progressively separate from the global air transportation network. One needs to remove a lower fraction of top Weighted Closeness airports to isolate regions compared to the Weighted Eigenvector attack. Furthermore, traveling in areas separated by the Weighted Closeness attack is still quite effective. In contrast, the Weighted Eigenvector attack is more damaging for regional transportation. This study opens new perspectives for better understanding the global air transportation network resilience.