Research On Topological Characteristics And Invulnerability Of China’s Air Route Network

Under the current air traffic control technology and the operation mode,the airspace capability has reached its limit,which will not meet the continuous growth of air traffic flow.Correspondingly,air route network’s scale and complexity are increasing,which impair the air traffic system’s predictability and controllability.In order to identify the fragile parts of the air route network which can contribute to the development of basis for air route network optimizing,operational monitoring,early warning and air traffic flow management,it is necessary to study the airway network’s intrinsic complexity mechanism.Firstly,a route network model with route intersections as nodes and segment distances as weights is established,using China’s air route network(CRN)in 2018.Several statistical models are made to fit the distribution of typical topological characteristics and traffic flow.The fitting results do not demonstrate strong correlations between the flow and either degree or betweenness of critical air route intersections in the operational sense.Second,by combing the traffic flow distribution and the concept of betweenness,the percolation centrality index is established to evaluate the air route intersections’ significance in CRN.Research has shown that the index of percolation centrality is strongly correlated with the flow of air route intersections.The critical air route intersections identified based on the percolation centrality are also operational significant.Therefore,percolation centrality can simultaneously reflect the structural and operational significance of air route intersections.Third,taking degree,betweenness and percolation centrality indicators as attack preferences,and the non-linear coefficient of airport’s OD pairs as invulnerability evaluation indicators,the static invulnerability test of CRN is conducted under random attacks and deliberate attacks.It is concluded that CRN is robust to random attacks,but highly vulnerable to deliberate attacks.The attack consequence by percolation centrality is the best,which further validates the advantage of percolation centrality to evaluate the significance of air route intersections.Finally,Monte Carlo simulation is conducted to observe the dynamic invulnerability of CRN under high dense air traffic flow,in which the traffic flow saturation is used as the indicator of route segment failure,and the air traffic flow entropy is used as the indicator observing the randomness of the air route network.The simulation identifies the congestion origins of CRN and discloses how the cascading failure is developed and spreading in CRN.The conclusions provide a qualitative and quantitative basis for implementing air traffic flow management strategy in China.