Topology and Robustness Analysis of Temporal Air Transport Network

Air Transport Network (ATN) has essential societal and economic functions. One important characteristic of ATN is its dynamic structure since the timings of departure and arrival of flights vary considerably. Static representation, measures and frameworks limit the study of certain properties of these networks. Here, we develop and demonstrate an approach to characterize the robustness of temporal ATN. We employ the following framework: 1) represent the USA flights considering the time-scheduled as a temporal network; 2) analyze the main airports ranked by the adapted centrality measures in different timestamps; 3) employ attack strategies in the top-ranked airport evaluating resilience. We demonstrate when the time is considered there are variations in the airport rank by centrality measures that are not captured by static approaches. Moreover, while the giant component is not affected by the time considered, the efficiency, which measures the time duration, drops significantly. The robustness measure indicates attacks considering the betweenness is the most damaged. This work encompasses a real scenario of ATN representation and contributes to the study of directed and temporal networks.