Empirical Analysis on Flight Flow Network Survivability of China

From the aspect of the complex network, this paper makes empirical analysis on the flight flow network structure of China from 2001 to 2010. The calculation of network statistical indicators reveals that the flight flow network has the small-world characteristics and the scale-free property. Then two indicators, the decline rate of the maximum connected sub-graph size and the decline rate of the overall efficiency are proposed to study the network survivability. Comparative analysis is conducted for different years, which indicates that the survivability of China flight flow network has an increasing trend and the network is more dependent on several key airports. Comparative analysis is also made for various attacks, which demonstrates that the flight flow network has strong robustness against random attack, but is vulnerable to deliberate attack. The reliability of the entire network is dominated by a few major airports, thus, the safe and effective operation of these airports should be ensured and it is essential to build some multi-hub systems in the future.