Resilience Analysis and Structural Robustness of Cities’ Regional Multi-Airport Systems

Abstract

Air transportation is a critical component of transportation system enabling fast and effective movement of passengers and freight and plays an important role in the prosperity and progress of city economy. However, in many cases, a city has multiple airports within its catchment area and these airport services have collaborative relationships, especially in the presence of airport disruptions, which are always neglected in previous resilience studies. To bridge this gap, this paper investigates the resilience of a city’s regional multi-airport system which refers to a group of airports serving the city. First, an aviation accessibility metric is proposed to evaluate the performance of a city’s regional multi-airports system in providing convenience for travel. Then, a resilience metric is developed based on the aviation accessibility to qualify the performance loss of a city’s regional multi-airport system in response to disruptions. Finally, a structural robustness index is first introduced to express the relation between flight distributions in a city’s regional multi-airport system and the resilience. Results show that there is a strong correlation between the structural robustness index of a city’s regional multi-airport system and its resilience index. Therefore, the findings of this study provide insightful suggestions for managing aviation resources in a city’s regional multi-airport system and improving the resilience of a city’s regional multi-airport system.

Keywords: Regional Multi-airport System, Accessibility, Resilience, Structural Robustness Index.