Structural characteristics and robustness analysis of aviation network based on centrality

Abstract

The importance of the aviation networks in the transportation infrastructure makes it crucial to identify the key nodes, analyze the complexity, and estimate robustness. In this paper, we propose to study the characteristics of the American aviation network structure by using the complex network theory and the Pajek application. The importance of nodes in the aviation network is ranked by degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and eigenvector centrality. We designed two models, random attacks and deliberate attacks, to simulate the robustness of the aviation networks. Deliberate attacks and random attacks are measured using the number of nodes in the maximal connected subgraph and network efficiency, and four centralities are used as deliberate attack approaches. And comparing the intensity of the deliberate attacks based on four centralities. The results show that: 1) the aviation network has strong aggregation, good overall connectivity, and significant characteristics of the scale-free and small-world networks; 2) the aviation network shows strong robustness in the face of random attacks but is relatively fragile in the face of deliberate attacks. Considering the deliberate attacks, the attack ability based on betweenness centrality is the strongest and the attack ability based on eigenvector centrality is the weakest. As for the attack that is based on degree centrality and closeness centrality is in between.