Modelling the Air Transport with Complex Networks: a short review

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent research on modeling air transport using complex network theory, focusing on airport connectivity, network resilience, and dynamics like passenger flow and epidemic spread.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of how complex network models are applied to analyze air transport systems, highlighting recent advances and open challenges.

Findings

Air transport networks exhibit small-world and scale-free properties.

Resilience of air networks varies with network topology and extreme events.

Dynamics such as passenger flow and epidemic spreading are influenced by network structure.

Abstract

Air transport is a key infrastructure of modern societies. In this paper we review some recent approaches to air transport, which make extensive use of theory of complex networks. We discuss possible networks that can be defined for the air transport and we focus our attention to networks of airports connected by flights. We review several papers investigating the topology of these networks and their dynamics for time scales ranging from years to intraday intervals, and consider also the resilience properties of air networks to extreme events. Finally we discuss the results of some recent papers investigating the dynamics on air transport network, with emphasis on passengers traveling in the network and epidemic spreading mediated by air transport.