Does the Chinese airline network become more robust over time?

Abstract

Currently, China has the fastest growing air transportation market in the world. Resilience to external events is critical to ensure an efficient and reliable transportation of passengers. This study investigates the robustness of the Chinese airline network under disruptions at their critical airports as well as the evolution of the networks' robustness from the year 2010 to 2015. Among the 24 Chinese airline networks in our study, we find that the topological properties of the networks differ significantly for these airlines. Each airline has its own few dominating hubs, where the number of hubs varies among airlines. Analysis of the robustness for the 24 Chinese airline networks show that they are quite robust against random failures, but the networks disintegrate quickly under targeted attacks. Evolutionary analysis of the robustness on a monthly resolution from 2010 to 2015 showed that the robustness does not change significantly over time for individual airline network, although the robustness measure R values vary for different airlines. This shows that the ongoing efforts to increase the resilience should be adjusted to better meet future needs for more reliable transportation. Our work contributes to a better understanding of the Chinese air transportation systems.