Insights into the world connectivity from aviation and tourism data

The World Airline Network (WAN) is an infrastructure that reduces the geographical gap between societies, both small and large, and bring forth economic gains. With the extensive use of a publicly maintained data set that contains information about airports and alternative connections between these airports, we empirically reveal that WAN is a redundant and resilient network for long distance air travel, but otherwise breaks down completely due to removal of short and apparently insignificant connections [1]. These short-range connections with moderate number of passengers are the connections that keep remote parts of the world accessible. It is surprising, insofar as there exists a highly resilient and strongly connected core consisting of a small fraction of airports (around 2.3%) together with an extremely fragile star-like periphery. The core-periphery structure is also observed for a number of important transport networks. With a dynamic model for the evolution of transport networks, we show that core-periphery structures are (very likely) a product of a tug of war between connectivity and economic profit [2]. Finally, we will discuss how the mobility pattern of tourists around the world correlates with the underlying Airline Network [3].

[1] T. Verma, N. A. M. Araújo, and H. J. Herrmann. Revealing the structure of the world airline network. Scientific Reports 4, 5638 (2014).
[2] T. Verma, F. Russmann, N. A. M. Araújo, J. Nagler, and H. J. Herrmann. Emergence of core-peripheries in networks. Nature Communications 7, 10441 (2016).
[3] T. Verma, L. Rebelo, N. A. M. Araújo. In preparation.