Fluctuations in airport arrival and departure traffic: A network analysis

Air traffic is a typical complex system, in which movements of traffic components (pilots, controllers, equipments, and environments), especially airport arrival and departure traffic, form complicated spatial and temporal dynamics. The fluctuations of airport arrival and departure traffic are studied from the point of view of networks as the special correlation between different airports. Our collected flow volume data on the time-dependent activity of US airport arrival and departure traffic indicate that the coupling between the average flux and the fluctuation on individual airport obeys a certain scaling law with a wide variety of scaling exponents between 1/2 and 1. These scaling phenomena can explain the interaction between the airport internal dynamics (e.g. queuing at airports, ground delay program, traffic following in flying) and change in the external (network-wide) traffic demand (e.g. the every day increase of traffic amount during peak hours), allowing us to further understand the mechanisms governing the transportation system collective behaviour. We separate the internal dynamics from the external fluctuations using scaling law which is helpful for us to systematically determine the origin of fluctuations in airport arrival and departure traffic, uncovering their collective dynamics. Hot spot features are observed in airport traffic data as the dynamical inhomogeneity in the fluxes of individual airports. The intrinsic characteristics of airport arrival and departure traffic under severe weather are discussed as well.