https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2013-01713-7
Regular Article
The accelerated growth of the worldwide air transportation network
1 Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2 Institute of Flight Systems and Automatic Control, Technische Universität Darmstadt
3 Pelargos Essential Advisory
a e-mail: azzam@mit.edu
b European Center for Aviation Development – ECAD GmbH (formerly).
Received:
10
October
2012
Revised:
29
November
2012
Published online:
29
January
2013
Mobility by means of air transportation has a critical impact on the global economy. Especially against the backdrop of further growth and an aggravation of the energy crisis, it is crucial to design a sustainable air transportation system. Current approaches focus on air traffic management. Nevertheless, also the historically evolved network offers great potential for an optimized redesign. But the understanding of its complex structure and development is limited, although modern network science supplies a great set of new methods and tools. So far studies analyzing air transportation as a complex network are based on divers and poor data, which are either merely regional or strongly bounded time-wise. As a result, the current state of research is rather inconsistent regarding topological coefficients and incomplete regarding network evolution. Therefore, we use the historical, worldwide OAG flight schedules data between 1979 and 2007 for our study. Through analyzing by far the most comprehensive data base so far, a better understanding of the network, its evolution and further implications is being provided. To our knowledge we present the first study to determine that the degree distribution of the worldwide air transportation network is non-stationary and is subject to densification and accelerated growth, respectively.
© EDP Sciences, Springer-Verlag, 2013