Evolving network characteristics of the asian international aviation market: A weighted network approach

The air transportation industry is one big network that is expected to grow continuously, and Asia-Pacific is the fastest growing region as of 2018 data. We apply weighted network analysis to explore the key network characteristics of the Asian international passenger aviation market in 2014 and 2018. For the analysis, networks are constructed based on international passengers' origin-destination pair data from 28 Asian airlines in 2014 and 2018. Previously published social network analysis (SNA) on the air transportation network largely used unweighted centrality metrics, whereas the actual situation is a weighted network. We implement Mean Associations (MA), Triangle Betweenness Centrality (TBC), and Weighted PageRank (WPR), as new weighted centrality metrics, to effectively reflect actual passenger traffic among airports beyond simple connections. Our weighted network analysis indicates that SIN, ICN, HKG, NRT, MNL, BKK, TPE, HND, PEK, and KUL are the top-ranked hub airports, followed by SGN, PVG, CAN, DEL, SYD, KIX and CGK, and that the low-cost carriers have almost fully developed a 'hub-and-spoke' structure over the 4-year study period and are increasing their impact on the centrality of airports in the region.