English

Universal bursty behavior in the air transportation system

Physics and Society 2015-12-16 v1

Abstract

Social activities display bursty behavior characterized by heavy-tailed inter-event time distributions. We examine the bursty behavior of airplanes' arrivals in hub airports. The analysis indicates that the air transportation system universally follows a power-law inter-arrival time distribution with an exponent α=2.5\alpha=2.5 and an exponential cutoff. Moreover, we investigate the mechanism of this bursty behavior by introducing a simple model to describe it. In addition, we compare the extent of the hub-and-spoke structure and the burstiness of various airline networks in the system. Remarkably, the results suggest that the hub-and-spoke network of the system and the carriers' strategy to facilitate transit are the origins of this universality.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1508.07862,
  title  = {Universal bursty behavior in the air transportation system},
  author = {Hidetaka Ito and Katsuhiro Nishinari},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.07862},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

23 pages, 8 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T10:45:20.873Z