Transportation Routes

Continental Airlines Air Route



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This is an example to show that most destination maps of airline companies offer an interesting case of a Scale-free network, where major airports play the role of networks hubs due to their large number of links (air connections). These hubs are the most reliable elements for the network robustness and sustainability. Considering an airline route map as a network, where the nodes are the airports and the links are the air connections between them, we can easily understand how it fits the scale-free model by satisfying all its characteristics, such as: growth, preferential attachment (rich get richer), power law distribution and modularity.


Air / Road network structure





By comparing India’s road map and air route map we can easily grasp the structural differences between both networks. These topologies link to Paul Baran’s schematic of three possible network structures for the Internet. While India’s road map, as most road networks, characterizes a Distributed network model, India’s air route exemplifies Baran’s Decentralized model or Barabasi’s Scale-free network model.