Research on the multilayer structure of flight delay in China air traffic network

For researches on flight delay from network perspective, we construct a directed weighted flight delay network and an innovative delay-propagating network to reveal the width and strength of flight delay. We use “width” to describe the range of delay, and “strength” to describe the growth of delay in the network. Then, we employ cumulative distributions of out-weight, which is consistent with air traffic network operation, to identify influential airports to the width and strength. Furthermore, we propose a state-of-the-art network decomposition method based on an airport’s influence on the width and strength. We also analyze layer characteristic in the context of flight delay. Only layer I tends to maintain and increase flight delay. The physical and innovative concepts and methods that we propose can stimulate both empirical analyses on air traffic networks and studies on network-level delay control and reduction.