New routes and airport connectivity

This paper aims to provide a tool for airports to evaluate the impact of new routes on their connectivity to the network. Even if the choice to open new routes is to carriers, airports and regional governments have some tools to promote desirable connections to be offered toward specific destination. The analysis employs an innovative methodology, called simulated annealing, to verify the existence of subsystems, or modules, of high interconnectivity within the European aviation network. The single modules are intended to group together airports with very strong links between them in terms of exchanged seats, while being more weakly connected to the rest of the network. Our hypothesis is that the most desirable new routes, from the accessibility point of view, are to important airports belonging to other modules. The lower the interchange between the modules of the two airports to be connected, the higher the connectivity. To test this hypothesis we consider 467 European airports with at least one scheduled flight in autumn 2007. After classifying each airport into modules, we show that the greater improvements in accessibility, measured as the average number of steps to reach any other airport in the network, occur when new routes are offered to relevant airports of relatively unconnected modules.