Measuring the resilience of airline operation networks

Incorporating resilience into the airline’s network planning and assessment prepares the airline for disruptive events. To measure and improve the resilience of an airline’s network, quantitative or qualitative metrics are required. In this work, we first propose a novel modeling approach by the leverage of temporal network theory to analyze the resilience of an airline’s operation network. A two-layer network is generated from an airline’s scheduling data and operation data using the proposed approach. By taking interactions of the network’s components and time-attributed information into consideration, the instantaneous network efficiency is defined to measure the performance of the network. We then develop a new resilience metric, average efficiency loss ratio (AELR), for airline’s operation network based on the instantaneous network efficiency. The proposed approach and metric are applied to four major U.S. airlines’ networks, including AA, UA, DL and WN using a publicly accessible dataset. Results show that Delta airlines has the highest resilience, but is more susceptible to severe flight delay and cancellation. The flight delay and cancellation effects on Southwest and American airlines operation network are similar. Our work may open an avenue for managing the resilience of airline’s networks.