Analysis on Chinese Airline Network Invulnerability

Air transportation systems are often subject to failures or attacks induced by unexpected abominable weather or temporal airspace occupation, while complex networks have been springing up as a convenient yet efficient tool to represent and analyze various realistic complex systems such as realistic airline system. In terms of Chinese airline network formed during the spring festival timespan, structural empirical research and invulnerability simulation analysis against various deliberate attack strategies were made using complex network theory, where nodes and edges denotes domestic airports and direct flights between them respectively. The analysis results indicate: The presented airline network is a small net-work with scale-free characteristics, and correlation shows remarkable hierarchical structure and obvious assortative characteristics; The network shows obvious invulnerability under deliberate node attack, while shows partly robustness under edge attack even with obvious attack effects against various attack strategies.