ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Phys.
Sec. Social Physics
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fphy.2025.1651460
This article is part of the Research TopicFinance and Production Complex SystemsView all 21 articles
Structural robustness of China's UAV enterprise operation network: A national and provincial analysis based on business homogeneity
Provisionally accepted
- 1Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China
- 2University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
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The rapid growth of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) market has surged enterprises, exposing them to systemic risks from business homogeneity. This issue has spread not only within the same level of the industrial chain but also across different segments. Despite China's enterprises spanning the entire chain as the largest market, their business structure and regional differences remain largely unexplored. Method: This paper constructs a three-tier UAV enterprise operation network and examines its national and provincial structural robustness through topological characteristics and network dismantling experiments.The results reveal that national-and provincial-level UAV enterprise operation network follows a power-law distribution, demonstrating the "rich-get-richer" phenomenon. The national network exhibits lower structural robustness than the provincial average, with downstream segments being particularly vulnerable. Provincial networks display significant regional heterogeneity; economically developed provinces demonstrate stronger internal coordination but are more fragile due to high centralization. Furthermore, provincial networks can be categorized into four distinct structural types, each with varying levels of efficiency and robustness. Discussion: The study highlights how business similarity fosters local coordination but increases systemic risk through structural homogeneity. To enhance network resilience, especially in downstream and centralized regions, strategies such as modular design and region-specific coordination are essential.
Keywords: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, multi-layer complex network, targeted attacks, Topological characteristics, Structural robustness
Received: 21 Jun 2025; Accepted: 23 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 ZHANG, Guo and Liu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jianfeng Guo, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
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