Improving airline efficiency and robustness using pruning algorithms.

(A) Actual data of travel frequency amongst 122 popular cities from the 3rd quarter of 2013 was used to define a source-target distribution. (B-C) Efficiency (travel time in terms of number of hops) and robustness (number of alternative routes with the same number of hops) comparison using different algorithms. Decreasing-rate pruning produced more efficient networks with similar robustness.