Research On Resilience Of Southwest Airspace Based On Complex Network

Amidst the growing demand for air transportation,various special circumstances,such as unsafe events,adverse weather conditions,and military activities,are leading to air traffic congestion,which is severely impacting the safety and efficiency of aircraft operations.The lack of coherence between strategic decisions,such as capacity and sector planning,and tactical decisions made by air traffic controllers in response to special circumstances is one of the primary reasons for air traffic congestion.This thesis aims to establish a control sector network from the perspective of complex network theory to reveal the inconsistencies between control operations and airspace structure division.To achieve this,the cascade failure-recovery process is proposed,which combines the resilience evaluation theory and the cascade failure model.The sector network model is constructed by treating controlled airspace sectors in the southwest region as nodes and abstracting the neighboring relationships between them as edges.By analyzing the sector network’s topological characteristics,we can compare the structural characteristics of the sector network with those of real control operations.We discovered that the sector network lacks small-world characteristics and is not scale-free,but it does exhibit scale-free characteristics in terms of control operation and sector structure.This scale-free characteristic indicates that some sectors serve as hub sectors in the southwest airspace.We also investigated the correlation of sector topological characteristics parameters and found the need for specific optimization for high-load sectors during sector planning.This optimization would increase the probability of systematic congestion in the airspace and make it difficult to transfer the excess load in the sectors to other sectors effectively,increasing the risk of aircraft operations.Furthermore,we evaluated the sector network’s static resilience performance from the perspective of network destructibility,using global network efficiency and maximum connectivity subgraph as evaluation metrics.We tested the model through four attack strategies reflecting different real-world situations and found that the sector network is resilient in maintaining the sector connectivity structure and guaranteeing the minimum pass-through capacity.However,the resilience in maintaining network operation efficiency and guaranteeing efficient aircraft traffic capacity could be better.This thesis proposed a cascading failure-recovery process,which combines the loadcapacity model of cascading failure theory and the public transportation resilience evaluation index,and applied it to evaluating sector networks.The degree-first and betweenness-first recovery strategies were simulated for the southwest control airspace.The degree-first recovery strategy results in less capacity loss and lower efficiency loss in the face of central sector failure.Overall,both recovery strategies cannot ensure the performance of sector network connectivity,but they can ensure good network capacity.In both cases,the degree-first strategy outperforms the betweenness-first strategy in network connectivity recovery.For network capacity resilience,the degree-first strategy is a better solution to failures in central sectors,while the betweennessfirst strategy is more effective for failures in busy sectors.