Spatio-Temporal Structural Analysis of Inter-Urban Aviation Network in China

As an important transportation infrastructure, air traffic plays a more and more important role in regional development, and related research is gradually increasing. These studies have mainly focused on transport policy, aviation system organization, and so on (Fleming and Hayuth, 1994; Shaw and Ivy, 1994;Taffe, 1996; Hooper, 1997; O’Kelly, 1998; Graham and Guyer, 1999; Vowles, 2000; Burghouwt and Hakfoort, 2001; Goertz, 2002; Jin and Wang, 2004). With the deregulation of civil aviation, some research has focused on hub-and-spoke aviation networks, and research methods have changed from earlier qualitative analysis to a deeper level of quantitative analysis, in order to investigate the spatial structures and dynamic evolutionary characteristics of aviation networks. Graham (1995) indicated that an integrated hub-and-spoke network of city-pairs was an ideal pattern for spatial network organization. Amraral (2000) studied the structural properties of World-wide Airport Networks (WAN) and concluded that WAN is a small-world network. The same result is found by Guimera (2005) that WAN is a scale-free small-world network. It is also found that in WAN the most connected cities are not necessarily the most central because of the multi-community structure of WAN. Moreover, the community of WAN has been detected and the results show that community structure cannot be explained based solely upon geographical constraints: geopolitical considerations have to be taken into account. Beyond the topological properties, WAN has been studied (Barrat, 2004) as a complex weighted network, where the weight is the traffic flow amount — the strength of interactions between the cities; the correlations among weighted quantities and the topological structure of the WAN are investigated for the first time. A model with geo-political constraints is proposed (Guimera, 2004) to explain the evolution and growth of WAN. However, there is still no much research on the spatial structural characteristics of aviation networks in developing countries by using complex network methods. Since the practice of reform and the opening-up policy in 1978, civil aviation in China has been developing rapidly (Chen, 1999; Cheng, 2000). Numbers of airports have been built and operated, and the aviation network is expanded(Table.1), so its structure has changed dramatically. However, very little was understood about the fundamental processes of the national air transportation network which was unfolding both temporally and spatially in China. In the current era of globalization, China was predicted to be the world’s fastest-growing aviation market, increasing from 69.6 million passengers in 1999 to an estimated 214.7 million passengers by 2014 (Granitsas, 2002). The Chinese air transportation network is economically not as significant as more highly-developed transportation networks in the USA and European countries. Nonetheless, the continued expansion of the air transportation network in China has posed great challenges, not only for our theoretical understanding of national transformation in a transitional planned economy, but also for planning and policy making for the betterment of over one-fifth of humankind (Pannell, 2002). Therefore, in this globalizing world, it is crucial to characterize the spatial structural features, the relevant organizational models, and the responsible evolutionary mechanisms of the air transportation network in such an important developing country. Table 1. Development of China’s air transport Data source: Statistical Data on Civil Aviation of China, 1981,1986,1991,1996,2001,2007. Year 198