Global Airport Resilience Index: Towards a comprehensive understanding of air transportation resilience

Estimating the vulnerability of airport outages on the air transportation system is an ongoing research challenge. While existing studies are predominantly focused on the analysis of the air-side airport network, with airports being nodes and links representing direct flights, in this study we propose the so-called Global Airport Resilience Index for worldwide airports which incorporates ground infrastructure as well as population distribution for the computation of an integrated resilience index that estimates the effects of airport disruptions on the entire system. Based on the Global Airport Resilience Index of airports, we can derive realistic assessment for airport resilience worldwide, where a more important airport has a higher index value. The inherent challenges in data management and computation are significant and require sophisticated solutions. Overall, we believe that our study provides novel insights into air transportation and airport resilience, by consideration of a more realistic resilience estimation measure.