Complex Network Analysis of the US Marine Highway Network

Complex Network Analysis of the US Marine Highway Network

연구 분야: Networking

학회: International Conference on Information Technology-New Generations

We model the US marine highway network (MHN) as an undirected graph of nodes (marine highways) and edges (two marine highways have an edge between them if there are one or more intermodal ports in the two highways). We focus on the 16 marine highways spanning over the gulf coast, east coast and mid west parts of the US. We present a comprehensive evaluation of the MHN graph with respect to the four major node centrality metrics (degree, eigenvector, betweenness and closeness), node centrality tuple (neighborhood-based bridge node centrality tuple), edge centrality metrics (betweenness), community detection and k-core decomposition. We also present a quantitative comparison of the MHN with road, rail and air transportation networks evaluation with respect to a suite of network-level metrics such as the assortativity index, bipartivity index, algebraic connectivity, randomness index and spectral radius ratio for node degree. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work in the Network Science literature to model and evaluate the US MHN using algorithms and metrics for complex network analysis.