Analysis of robustness of alliance route networks

Citation

Lordan, O., Sallan, J. M.; Simo, P., Gonzalez-Prieto, D. (2014). Analysis of robustness of alliance route networks. 2014 ATRS World Conference. KEDGE Business School. Bordeaux, France

Abstract

PURPOSE
This study analyzes the robustness of the three major airline alliances (Star Alliance, oneworld and SkyTeam) route network to unintended errors and intentional attacks. Robustness is assessed in two ways: with an edge-betweenness based vulnerability scale, and with the evolution of the size of the giant component as a function of number of disconnected nodes.

METHODOLOGY
Network robustness is assessed in several ways. First, it is proposed a normalization of a multi-scale measure of the vulnerability in order to compare the performance of networks with different sizes. Second, several adaptive strategies are proposed to minimize the size of giant component with a given fraction of disconnected nodes. Together with other approaches found in the literature, a node selection criterion based on network efficiency is introduced. Finally, it is described a new procedure -the inverted adaptive strategy- for sorting the nodes in order to anticipate the breakdown of a network.

ANTICIPATED RESULTS
Results show that Star Alliance has the most resilient route network, followed by SkyTeam and oneworld. Besides, the inverted adaptive strategy based on the efficiency criterion -inverted efficiency- shows a good performance to break networks, similar or even better than the adaptive strategy based on node betweenness.

KEYWORDS
Airline alliances, route networks, robustness, airport closure.