Air Transportation Infrastructure Robustness Assessment for Proactive Systemic Risk Management

A key attribute of resilience, robustness serves as a predictor of infrastructure system performance under disruptions, thus informing proactive infrastructure risk management. A literature review indicated that previous studies did not consider some key factors that can influence the robustness of air transportation infrastructure networks (ATIN) and thus their (system-level cascade) systemic risk management processes. In this respect, the current study first assesses existing methodologies and then develops a new methodology to quantify the robustness of ATIN. Specifically, based on integrating travel time and flight frequency, the study develops alternative best-route and link-weight approaches to assess key ATIN robustness measures and relevant operating cost losses (OCL). In order to demonstrate the practical use of the developed methodology, the robustness and the associated OCL of the Canadian domestic air traffic network are evaluated under random failures (i.e., disruptive events that occur randomly) and targeted threats (i.e., disruptive events that occur deliberately). The analysis results show that the network robustness is influenced by the utilized evaluation approach, especially after 20% of the network components become nonoperational. Overall, the methodology developed within this study is expected to provide ATIN policymakers with the means to quantify the network robustness and OCL, and thus enable ATIN resilience-guided proactive risk management in the face of natural or anthropogenic hazard realizations.