China's Aviation Network Structure And Evolution Analysis

As significant infrastructures which play an important role in the social and economic development for a city,region and country,the aviation networks have given rise to special concerns from researchers from all fields,who are committed to exploring the discipline of aviation industry,understanding the complex interaction between customers,airline companies and government in the aviation networks, grasping the mechanism behind the networks and the operation system,improving the operation efficiency and making it better serve the people.Up to now,the aviation network has developed to the gigantic scale,which involves the complex networks theory as a powerful tool to research complex system to enhance the understanding of the overall situation of the aviation networks.After decades of construction and development,the aviation system of China has formed a scale.Now there have been national aviation hubs of Beijing,Shanghai and Guangzhou,regional centers of Chengdu,Kunming,Chongqing etc.,and several city airports.Complex networks theory can provide strong theoretical support for the further centralized operation model of the aviation network of China.This dissertation studies the national aviation networks that consist of many airline companies,using complex networks theory as a guide.Complex networks theory can reveal those areas traditionally neglected by management science,and overcome limitation of emphasizing the decision on the micro level but neglecting overall networks features,which are referable for companies and governments.Since current models focus on topological properties and omit weight dynamics,they can't give satisfactory explanation of transportation networks.We creatively propose a weighted network evolution model based on the passengers behavior on transportation networks which can deepen our understanding of transportation networks.Based on the aviation network of China,which consists of 136 city nodes and 1701 direct flights between the cities,this dissertation has mainly achieved the following work:1.Study the topological properties of the aviation network of China.We analyze the structure of the aviation network of China,looking at it as a mathematical graph and investigate its topological properties such as the degree and the betweenness centrality distributions.We find that it has very remarkable features, being like a scale-free network.It can also be classified as a small-world network. The aviation network of China shows evidence of community structure as well as hiberarchy and the rich-club phenomenon.2.Study the evolution mechanism of the aviation network of China.We propose a weighted network evolution model in which new links choose nodes according to minimum cost objective.Cost functions take two factors into account:economy of scale and congestion cost.It combines many factors like distance,time,convenience and flow into one.Through simulation,we get truncated scale-free networks which fairly match the degree distribution of aviation networks.3.Study the airports cluster in Yangtze River Delta.To study the over-crowed and low efficiency problem encountered in the airports in Yangtze River Delta,we adopt the approach of complex networks and customer choice theory to analyze the route choice of passengers and show the influence of hub airports to the airports around.Actual data are used to simulate the passengers' choice.Especially we analyze Nanjing airports.Finally we propose some suggestions to future development of airline industry and regulation.