Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 215, 23-33 (2013)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2013-01712-8

Regular Article

Modeling the multi-layer nature of the European Air Transport Network: Resilience and passengers re-scheduling under random failures

¹ Department of Condensed Matter Physics, University of Zaragoza, Spain
² Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI), University of Zaragoza, Spain
³ Center for Biomedical Technology (CTB), Technical University of Madrid, Spain
⁴ INNAXIS Foundation and Research Institute, Madrid, Spain
⁵ Departamento de Engenharia Electrotécnica, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
⁶ Department of Applied Mathematics, Rey Juan Carlos University, Madrid, Spain

^a e-mail: alessio.cardillo@ct.infn.it
^b e-mail: massimiliano.zanin@ctb.upm.es
^c e-mail: gardenes@gmail.com
^d e-mail: miguel.romance@urjc.es
^e e-mail: alejandro.garciadelamo@urjc.es
^f e-mail: stefano.boccaletti@fi.isc.cnr.it

Received: 30 July 2012
Revised: 29 November 2012
Published online: 29 January 2013

Abstract

We study the dynamics of the European Air Transport Network by using a multiplex network formalism. We will consider the set of flights of each airline as an interdependent network and we analyze the resilience of the system against random flight failures in the passenger's rescheduling problem. A comparison between the single-plex approach and the corresponding multiplex one is presented illustrating that the multiplexity strongly affects the robustness of the European Air Network.