Robustness and Topology Analysis of European Air Traffic Network Using Complex Network Theory

This paper explores topological and operational features of the European Air Traffic Network (EATN), which consists of airports and Area Control Centres (ACCs), with the goal of analysing and quantifying network robustness. The EATN is regarded as a directed, weighted and asymmetric graph, where various metrics, including betweenness, are studied and analysed statistically. On the operational side, the EATN is recognized as a flow-bearing and capacitated air transport network with established origins and destinations as well as flight routes. The authors propose a Relative Area Index (RAI), combined with network flow maximization techniques, to capture and quantify the degradation in the network throughput in the event of local disruptions on different levels – a concept frequently referred to as robustness in the literature. The authors' findings show that the RAI follows the power law distribution. Moreover, it is not correlated with betweenness centrality, which is a popular index used to infer the robustness of topological networks. The authors show that topological inferences such as betweenness are insufficient to capture network robustness in the real world, and that a class of new indices that reflect the operational constraints, flow patterns and behavioural assumptions should be developed to assess the robustness of air traffic networks.