Analysis on the Belt and Road Initiative flight network Based on Markov Clustering and Complex Network

A weighted directed flight network in the Belt and Road Initiative(BRI) region was constructed in this paper, which takes the airports as nodes and the connection relations between airports as edges. Based on the complex network, the structural characteristics of the BRI flight network are statistically analyzed. At the same time, the Markov clustering algorithm was used to explore the clustering characteristics of national airports. The research results showed that: l The average degree of nodes in the flight network is 13.36, which means there are more than 13 airports directly connected with the one in average; The average distance among the BRI flight network is about 3.2, which means any two airports can be reached within more than 3 transfers in the regions of BRI; 2 The degree distribution of the nodes in the flight network presented a power-law distribution, BRI flight network is a kind of typical scale-free network which means vast majority of airports have a very small number of direct connections with other airports while the few remaining airports possess most direct links; 3 In this paper, we got 12 clusters in which the number of airports is more than 10 based on Markov clustering, airports in the Belt and Road Initiative show the characteristic of spatial clustering, that is, airports near to each other in space gather together. This paper aims to provide support for the development and decision-making of the Belt and Road Initiative aviation industry.