Title: A nodal regional analysis of air passenger transport in Europe

Authors: Giuseppe Borruso

Addresses: Department of Economics, Business, Mathematics and Statistics, University of Trieste, Via Valerio 4/1, 34127 Trieste, Italy

Abstract: The aim of this paper is examining the relations between EU airports and cities from the passengers air transport point of view, observing the polarisation of flows towards some nodes of the European air transport network. The analysis is carried out highlighting nodal regions, obtained observing the interactions among cities and airports pairs in terms of the dominant flows. We use a selection from Eurostat Database of 277 airports and 3,572 routes between airport pairs in the 27 EU countries. Nystuen and Dacey's theory of network analysis is used to explore the characteristics of the 'European sky' to understand how nodal regions appear in terms of dominance of interactions, measured by means of air traffic flows, and what European - regional hierarchies can be observed. The analysis allowed observing both nodal regions centred on airports dominant over international connections, as well as national and local situations, where a node is dominant over national ones.

Keywords: airline networks; regional hierarchies; nodal regional analysis; polarisation; GIS; EU airports; European Union; air passenger transport; air transport networks; network analysis.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIDM.2013.059260

International Journal of Business Intelligence and Data Mining, 2013 Vol.8 No.4, pp.377 - 396

Published online: 28 Jun 2014 *

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