Complex network applications to the infrastructure systems: the italian airport network case

In this paper the structure of the Italian Airport Network (IAN) has been analysed, describing it as a mathema' graph and investigating its topological properties by means of a non standard point of view based on the approach of multiple addendials. It turns out that this network has remarkable and interesting features, such as like the one to be a scale-free network, s' both the degree and the betweenness centrality distributions follow a typical power-law behaviour, well known in litera like a Double Pareto Law. Moreover, these distributions exhibit a number of interesting peculiarities, like the existence of some "hubs" in the netw i.e., in the graph theory's jargon, nodes with a very large number of links. According to a preliminary investigation the IAN can be also considered a candidate to represent a small-world networ the mean distance L between reachable pairs of airports grows at most as the logarithm of the number of airports.