Analysis of the weighted Chinese air transportation multilayer network

Air transportation system is a crucial infrastructure of modern world. In this paper, we analyze the weighted Chinese air transportation network with the framework of multilayer network, in which each layer is defined by a commercial airline (company) and the weight of links is set respectively by the number of flights, the number of seats and the geographical distance between pairs of airports. It is shown that the size of the airlines can be characterized approximatively by the number of air routes they operated. The numeric results also indicate that the CCA (air China) is of a considerable higher value of maximal degree and betweenness than other top airlines. Our work will be helpful to better understand and model the Chinese air transportation network.