Empirical analysis of the cruise shipping network in Asia

Abstract

The cruise shipping market has been growing dynamically in the past two decades. This study presented an empirical analysis of the Asian cruise shipping network (ACSN) in which the nodes are cruise ports and links are cruise routes connecting the ports, using complex network analysis. An analysis of 245 voyages operated by 16 cruise lines between 215 ports in 26 countries found that ports in the ACSN are connected by 704 links. The ACSN is a small-world network with a small average path length and a high clustering coefficient, and its degree distribution follows an exponential function. A small number of ports have high connectivity, and most ports have low connections. Most high-degree ports connect to low-degree ports. The important roles and properties of ports vary depending on centrality measures.