Strategic business management for airport alliance: A complex network approach to simulation robustness analysis

In recent years, the issue of airport alliance has been the hot interest in academia. Compared with the total aviation network, the airport alliance network has higher flight density, which may lead to different topological and robustness properties. However, few studies have focused on the airport alliance and its strategic business management. In this paper, we leverage a complex network approach to conduct the topological analysis and robustness simulation by taking North China Regional Airport Alliance as a case, we apply ''random disturbance'' and ''intentional attack'' to measure the connectivity, functionality and aggregation robustness. The results show that the airport alliance has strong robustness against disturbances while has weak robustness against intentional attacks. Furthermore, the large difference exists in the impacts of distinct airports, and critical navigable cities which have significant influence on the overall system performance are identified. (C) 2021 Published by Elsevier B.V.