Chinese domestic airline networks:

Abstract

We study the spatial form of the networks of the 17 largest domestic airlines by analyzing their edge length, degree distribution, betweenness and clustering coefficients, and discover that the whole Chinese domestic airline network is not a scale-free small-world network. We analyze each network with two different metrics (i) fitness: we minimize the diameter of networks, and maximize the passenger flow for each edge at the same time in order to improve the fitness of the network. (ii) robustness: we use a new method to measure robustness by computing the change edge weights after removing a series of hubs. Finally, we compare the robustness of the different airlines networks and find that some small domestic airlines have very good robustness properties.