Study on Structural Characteristics of China’s Passenger Airline Network Based on Network Motifs Analysis

Ying Jin,Chunliang Xiu,Kaixian Yang,Wei Song,Ye Wei

doi:10.3390/su11092484

Abstract

The air passenger transport network system is an important agent of social and economic connections between cities. Studying on the airline network structure and providing optimization strategies can improve the airline industry sustainability evolution. As basic building blocks of broad networks, the concept of network motifs is cited in this paper to apply to the structural characteristic analysis of the passenger airline network. The ENUMERATE SUBGRAPHS (G, k) algorithm is used to identify the motifs and anti-motifs of the passenger airline network in China. A total of 37 airline companies are subjected to motif identification and exploring the structural and functional characteristics of the airline networks corresponding to different motifs. These 37 airline companies are classified according to the motif concentration curves into three development stages, which include mono-centric divergence companies at the low-level development stage, transitional companies at the intermediate development stage, and multi-centric and hierarchical companies at the advanced development stage. Finally, we found that adjusting the number of proper network motifs is useful to optimize the overall structure of airline networks, which is profitable for air transport sustainable development.

Highlights

Passenger aviation plays a unique role in the global transportation system, facilitating the high-speed carriage of people over long distances
Based on the complex network theory, the air transportation system can be viewed as a spatial network where the nodes are airports and the edges are air routes or flights
37 Chinese air passenger transport companies were classified according to the motif concentration curves, to explore the structure and evolution of China’s passenger airline network

Summary

Introduction

Passenger aviation plays a unique role in the global transportation system, facilitating the high-speed carriage of people over long distances. A number of these studies focused on the overall structure of the airline network, like the small-world [1], the scale-free distribution [2], community structures [3], or hub-and-spoke organizational patterns [4]. This kind of study can be categorized as a structure-oriented perspective [5]. Scholars mainly raised questions from the perspective of nodes and their relationships, like the investigation of centrality measures [6], clustering [7], or assortativity [8], etc This group of studies can be categorized as a node-oriented perspective. We try to apply a combined “structure-node” concept, namely network motifs, to analyze the microcosmic organization of the airline network, hoping to make some novel discoveries and provide new insights in understanding the air transportation system

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Methods

Conclusion