Analysis and Evolution of Airport Network of India

Air transportation network (ATN) is the most important facet of every nation's infrastructure for its economic development. This study examined the airport network of India (ANI) in order to have a better understanding of its characteristics. ANI consists of domestic civil aviation infrastructure of India. According to the present analysis, directed unweighted ANI, preserves the topological properties of being scale-free and a small world network. Compared to earlier studies, ANI have evolved in terms of both structural (airport, air route) and air traffic. Directed weighted ANI with edge weight of flight frequency per week provides information on several network properties like airports with high incoming flights, shortest paths between any two airports, average number of flights need to change by a passenger and airports in ANI which is highly connected. To the end, the airports with high in-degree and betweenness centrality and evaluation of ANI over the last one decade has been shown.