Revealing the structure of the world airline network
The World Airline Network (WAN) is an infrastructure that can reduce the distance gap in the world and make economic growth. Through extensive use of publicly maintained data sets, which contain information about airports and alternative connections between these airports, we empirically show that WAN is a redundant and resilient network for long-distance air travel, but otherwise breaks down completely due to removal of short and apparently insignificant connections. These short-haul connections with a medium number of passengers and standby flights are the connections that keep remote areas of the world reachable. Surprisingly, there is a highly elastic and tightly connected core consisting of a small portion of the airport (approximately 2.3%) and an extremely fragile star-shaped periphery.
In class we talked about network, which the concept is used in many aspects, such as social network, traffic network, relationship network. As expected, the airlines also has its network, and it is similar to the network we learned in class, and has lots of interesting thing in it. The airline network can be modeled that with some hub and many destinations, airlines connects hub to hub and hub to destination. For example, Ithaca is a desination while Detroit, Washington D.C is the hub. We connect them with Delta Airlines and United Airlines. There is a conclusion in airlines network: in our world, for any airport to any other airport, we only need to take 4 planes at most, we only need to take 4 planes at most. Like the six degrees of separation, which all people on average are six, or fewer, social connections away from each other.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep05638
