A Temporal Event Graph Approach and Robustness Analysis for Air Transport Network

Air transport networks (ATNs) are critical to mobility and the worldwide economy. ATNs are temporal networks characterized by time-stamped information and a sequence of recurrent temporal events. Thus, static analyses disregard the real-world temporal structure of ATN. The trips are driven by considerations of cost and convenience, this way, more accurate representations, and models are necessary. Despite that, few studies have explored temporal representation for ATN. Here, we propose a temporal representation for ATN using event graphs, investigating the temporal network's topology and robustness. We also introduce a new Temporal Breadth-First-Search Pruning (T-BFS-P) algorithm to traverse the event graph paths. A study in the U.S. and Brazilian domestic ATN's robustness is presented, in which target attacks by centrality measures, giant component variation, and the robustness measure were conducted. The results show that our T-BFS-P is five times faster in execution than Dijkstra and classical BFS for the U.S. ATN. It also allows finding the shortest paths with the minimum number of nodes (airports) in the path, optimizing travelers' connections. This work contributes to temporal network area reporting a new representation and temporal BFS algorithm via event graph, and a pioneer study to analyze robustness in event graph.

Automated summary

This research introduces a temporal representation for air transport networks using event graphs and a new Temporal Breadth-First-Search Pruning algorithm. A study on the robustness of domestic ATNs in the U.S. and Brazil shows that the new algorithm is five times faster than traditional methods, allowing for the discovery of shortest paths and optimization of traveler connections.