Mining the structure and evolution of the airport network of China over the past twenty years

Abstract

In this paper we study the Airport Network of China (ANC), which represents China's domestic civil aviation infrastructure, as a complex network. We mine the structure and evolution of ANC over the past twenty years by using the real aviation data in the year of 1984, 1993 and 2006. The main contributions can be summarized as three-fold: firstly, we analyze ANC by using the complex network analysis method and find that ANC is a typical small world network with high clustering coefficient and small diameter; secondly, we find that the evolution of ANC over the past twenty years meets the densification law and shrinking/stabilizing diameter law; lastly, some interesting patterns of airports in ANC are found by the visual data mining, such as Circle Pattern, Province Capital Pattern and Star Pattern. © 2009 Springer.