Finding community structure in spatial maritime shipping networks

Abstract

This study explores the community structure in spatial maritime shipping networks. As compared with air transportation networks and urban road networks, ports in spatial maritime shipping networks have smaller connections due to the physical confinement. A new divisive algorithm is proposed for detecting community structure in spatial maritime shipping networks. At each iteration for modularity optimization, the length of each edge is successively updated, instead of edge removal used in the conventional divisive method. Finally, numerical experiments based on the global maritime shipping network are carried out to account for the properties of community structure in spatial maritime shipping networks. © 2012 World Scientific Publishing Company.