Abstract:

In order to improve airport network's ability to cope with emergencies, topological characteristics of Chinese airport network before and after COVID-19 were analyzed based on complex network theory. And the network was weighted by using node strength, and an invulnerability assessment method was developed after identifying inflection points of loss fitting curves for weighted network characteristics metrics under different attack strategies. The results show that the topological structure of airport weighted network has no significant changes before and after the pandemic, but its connectivity is slightly sparse. And the airport network in China is much more vulnerable under different intentional attack strategies. When attack ratio reaches 8.6%, inflection point of loss fitting curves will appear, and relative loss of global network efficiency will amount to 24.39%, while reduction rate of the largest connected subgraph reaches 14.67%, and relative loss of average degree and average clustering coefficient is up to 76.87% and 68.84%, respectively. Moreover, loss of network efficiency and the largest connected subgraph reduction rate accelerates after inflection points, in which stage the network will be paralyzed.

Key words: corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19), airport weighted network, invulnerability, loss curve, inflection point