Resilience and rewiring of the passenger airline networks in the United States

TL;DR

This study examines the resilience of US passenger airline networks, showing dense interconnectivity enhances robustness against disruptions and proposing rewiring methods to further improve network resilience.

Contribution

It reveals that highly interconnected networks are more resilient and introduces rewiring schemes that enhance robustness while maintaining operational requirements.

Findings

Dense networks with high k-cores are highly resilient to node and edge removals.

Rewiring schemes can significantly improve network resilience without increasing operational costs.

Point-to-point networks may outperform hub-and-spoke systems in resilience to disruptions.

Abstract

The air transportation network, a fundamental component of critical infrastructure, is formed from a collection of individual air carriers, each one with a methodically designed and engineered network structure. We analyze the individual structures of the seven largest passenger carriers in the USA and find that networks with dense interconnectivity, as quantified by large k-cores for high values of k, are extremely resilient to both targeted removal of airports (nodes) and random removal of flight paths paths (edges). Such networks stay connected and incur minimal increase in an heuristic travel time despite removal of a majority of nodes or edges. Similar results are obtained for targeted removal based on either node degree or centrality. We introduce network rewiring schemes that boost resilience to different levels of perturbation while preserving total number of flight and gate requirements. Recent studies have focused on the asymptotic optimality of hub-and-spoke spatial networks under normal operating conditions, yet our results indicate that point-to-point architectures can be much more resilient to perturbations.