An Analysis of Centrality Measures of Iran's Province Capitals based on Road and Air Connections (Using Gephi)

Because of the market access enhancement and lowered transport costs, development of transport infrastructures has been shown to increase productivity, competition, and business activity. In this article, we calculate and analyze different centrality measures of Iran’s province capitals based on their road and air connections in 2015. In this regard, related information about road and air routes were accumulated and centrality and Betweenness rank of each province capital were determined. The result indicates major gaps between centrality measures of the cities based on air and road networks. The city of Hamedan has the highest Betweenness centrality value on road network with 0.293 and Urmia is at the bottom of the list with zero centrality. For Betweenness centrality based on air network, metropolises of Tehran and Mashhad are far ahead of the rest of the cities. It was noted that geographical factors such as location, particularly the lack of other cities in the surrounding or directly linked to neighboring cities with each other, are among the major factors in centrality rank of a city. Finally, we divided the selected 31 capital cities into four modularity classes based on their road connections. We also introduce Gephi software as a useful tool to calculate centrality measures. Research type is descriptive-analytic and method used to extract data is documental.