Analysis of the Airport Network of India as a complex weighted network

TL;DR

This paper analyzes India's domestic airport network as a complex weighted network, revealing its small-world, hierarchical, and disassortative properties, and compares its traffic dynamics with global airport networks.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of India's airport network as a weighted complex network, highlighting unique structural and traffic features.

Findings

ANI is a small-world network with a truncated power-law degree distribution.

Traffic is concentrated among large, interconnected airports.

ANI exhibits disassortative mixing, differing from global airport networks.

Abstract

Transportation infrastructure of a country is one of the most important indicators of its economic growth. Here we study the Airport Network of India (ANI), which represents India's domestic civil aviation infrastructure, as a complex network. We find that ANI, a network of domestic airports connected by air links, is a small-world network characterized by a truncated power-law degree distribution, and has a signature of hierarchy. We investigate ANI as a weighted network to explore its various properties and compare them with their topological counterparts. The traffic in ANI, as in the World-wide Airport Network (WAN), is found to be accumulated on interconnected groups of airports and is concentrated between large airports. In contrast to WAN, ANI is found to be having disassortative mixing which is offset by the traffic dynamics. The analysis indicates toward possible mechanism of formation of a national transportation network, which is different from that on a global scale.