As online shopping becomes a trend, there is more and more businesses rely on cargo transportation. Air cargo plays an important role in providing fast and high quality services in international transportation, so it makes me wonder which airport is the world’s busiest airport.
A social network could be used to represent the air transportation system. Each node in the network refers to an airport, and each edge refers to a direct flight between 2 airports. Degree centrality and betweenness centrality are taken into the calculation in finding the world busiest airport. When degree centrality is being calculated, the number of nodes connected to each node is measured. The greater the amount of neighbor nodes which directly connect to the object, the greater value of degree centrality the object would have. A higher degree centrality of a node means that the airport which the node represents has more operation flights with other airports. Betweenness of airport A measures the number of shortest paths from all airports to all other airports in the network that pass through the airport A. In other word, betweeness indicates how important an airport is as a intermediate broker in the network. A hub airport is usually evolved from an airport with high betweeness centrality.
In order to analyze the airport transport network, a research team combined data from Star Alliance, Oneworld, and Sky Team and built a massive network of 1060 airports and 5580 routes in 173 countries.
The degree centrality is calculated by the same research team. I would like to share the top 20 airports which has the greatest degree centrality in the world here.
As we can see here, Istanbul Airport in Turkey has the highest degree centrality, followed by the Beijing Capital International Airport in China and Chicago O’Hare International Airport in the United States. According to the data shared by the same research team, Istanbul Airport in Turkey had 33.55 times more connectivity than the average 7.78 degree centrality in the world. Beijing Capital International Airport and Chicago O’Hare International Airport have 27.7 higher connectivity than the average.
Betweenness centrality has been calculated by the research team as well. I will select the top 20 airports in the world which has the highest betweenness centrality to share it here in comparision with the top 20 airports with the highest degree centrality.
The top 3 airports with the highest betweeness centrality is the same as the top 3 airports in the degree centrality ranking. The correlation between degree centrality and betweness centrality makes sense in this context. The average betweenness degree is 6019.90 among 1060 airports in the world. The betweenness degree of Istanbul Airport is 19.61 times higher than the average, followed by the Beijing Airport which is 19.61 times higher.
In addition, the study also found that United States and China had the largest share in the global network. The sum of the degree centrality and the sum of the betweenness centrality both acount for roughly half of the entire network. In developing countries, there is more and more airports are under construction due to the growth of the demand in global business. The airport transportation network might look different in 10 or 20 years from now and some of the airports with high betweenness might become the new centralized hub globally. As it is now, based on the current betweenness and degree centrality, the busiest airport in the world is Istanbul Airport in Turkey.
References
Song, M. G., & Yeo, G. T. (2017). Analysis of the Air Transport Network Characteristics of Major Airports. The Asian Journal of Shipping and Logistics, 33(3), 117-125. doi:10.1016/j.ajsl.2017.09.002