Causality networks of air transport delay propagation

The following interactive map reports two types of aeronautical networks:
1. The physical connections between nodes, that is, the presence of a direct flight of an airline between pairs of airports.
2. Functiona networks of delays. These are calculated by assessing how delays (of flights of a given airline) in a given airport influence the delays in a second one.
This is thus similar to the functional networks used to understand brain dynamics - only that, instead of information, here delay propagation is measured.

To use this map, simply select one airline and one metric from the lists on the left.

Notice the interesting (and non-trivial results) that can be obtained. For instance, select "TAP" and "Physical network": you will recover the network of connections of TAP in 2011, which has Lisbon as the main hub. Nothing strage at the moment. Now, try select "Transfer Entropy", again with "TAP": observe as the network is now centered in the airport of Málaga, in Spain. Even if the center of TAP's activity is Lisbon, the second graph indicates that any perturbation (in the form of delay) appearing in Málaga will propagate across the whole network!

For more information about the network reconstruction procedures, please refer to: M. Zanin, "Can we neglect the multi-layer structure of functional networks?", Physica A 430, 184-192 (2015).