Analyzing the topological characteristic and key nodes of Chinese air sector network

Abstract

In this paper, an air sector network (ASN) model is established based on the airspace of Chinese mainland. Meanwhile, the ASN is a weighted graph whose nodes are sectors, and its edge weight is the flights between sectors. In addition, a node ranking algorithm is proposed according to the variation coefficient method (VCM). Then, the topological structure of the ASN is analyzed by the complex network theory, simultaneously, the key sectors are ranked through the proposed VCM. The results indicate that the ASN has heterogeneous and assortativity structure characteristics to a certain extent. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed VCM centrality measure is verified by the susceptible-infected-removed (SIR) model and Kendall’s tau coefficient. Results show that the VCM centrality method is applicable and effective.