Structural and spectral properties of generative models for synthetic multilayer air transportation networks

To understand airline transportation networks (ATN) systems we can effectively represent them as multilayer networks, where layers capture different airline companies, the nodes correspond to the airports and the edges to the routes between the airports. We focus our study on the importance of lever...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2021-10, Vol.16 (10), p.e0258666-e0258666
Main Authors: Fügenschuh, Marzena, Gera, Ralucca, Méndez-Bermúdez, José Antonio, Tagarelli, Andrea
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aeronautics
Air transportation
Air transportation industry
Aircraft
Aircraft - statistics & numerical data
Airlines
Airports
Algorithms
Humans
Matrix theory
Methods
Modelling
Models, Theoretical
Multilayers
Percolation
Properties
Resilience
Social networks
Statistical models
System effectiveness
Transportation - methods
Transportation networks
Travel - statistics & numerical data
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Summary:To understand airline transportation networks (ATN) systems we can effectively represent them as multilayer networks, where layers capture different airline companies, the nodes correspond to the airports and the edges to the routes between the airports. We focus our study on the importance of leveraging synthetic generative multilayer models to support the analysis of meaningful patterns in these routes, capturing an ATN's evolution with an emphasis on measuring its resilience to random or targeted attacks and considering deliberate locations of airports. By resorting to the European ATN and the United States ATN as exemplary references, in this work, we provide a systematic analysis of major existing synthetic generation models for ATNs, specifically ANGEL, STARGEN and BINBALL. Besides a thorough study of the topological aspects of the ATNs created by the three models, our major contribution lays on an unprecedented investigation of their spectral characteristics based on Random Matrix Theory and on their resilience analysis based on both site and bond percolation approaches. Results have shown that ANGEL outperforms STARGEN and BINBALL to better capture the complexity of real-world ATNs by featuring the unique properties of building a multiplex ATN layer by layer and of replicating layers with point-to-point structures alongside hub-spoke formations.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0258666