Abstract: To effectively identify the weak parts in the route network and evaluate the decay of the route network's operational efficiency after the failure of critical nodes, an empirical study on the invulnerability of China's air route network is conducted from the perspective of a complex cyber system. Firstly, the percolation centrality is established by modifying the degree centrality based on actual origin destination(OD) pairs. The statistical comparison shows that the percolation centrality can reflect the operational importance of route points more accurately than the degree centrality and the betweenness centrality. The numerical node attack experiment is then conducted, taking the degree, betweenness and the percolation centrality each separately as the attack preference, to observe the growth of non-linear coefficient after the air route network is attacked. The results show that China's route network is robust to random attacks while vulnerable to targeted attacks. Taking the percolation centrality as preference, the attack accuracy and intensity is superior to centrality and betweenness, and the effectiveness of air route percolation centrality as measure of importance is thus verified.

Key words: air route network, invulnerability, percolation centrality, non-linear coefficient