Runway incursions remain a major threat to airport surface safety, and effective prevention depends on the accurate identification of causal risk factors and their interaction mechanisms. However, existing studies have mainly focused on isolated risk factors or static causal relationships, offering limited insight into the hierarchical structure and dynamic propagation of runway incursion risk in complex operational environments. To address this gap, this study proposes a quantitative framework for runway incursion risk analysis by integrating grounded theory and complex network theory. Published runway incursion cases in the Chinese civil aviation system from 2022 to 2025 were systematically analyzed through open coding, axial coding, and selective coding, resulting in a hierarchical indicator system comprising five main categories, twelve subcategories, and 112 risk indicators. Based on this system, a runway incursion causal network was constructed to characterize the causal interdependencies among risk factors. Node importance was evaluated using a TOPSIS-based multi-criteria method integrating multiple network metrics, and a load-distribution-based propagation mechanism was introduced to quantify the risk propagation probability and risk propagation intensity of each node. The results indicate that insufficient night lighting (N99), taxi-route memory errors (N14), ambiguous controller instructions (N1), and excessive controller workload (N10) exhibit relatively high risk propagation probability and risk propagation intensity, indicating their critical roles in the evolution and cascading propagation of runway incursion risk. These findings demonstrate that the proposed framework can effectively capture both the structural importance and propagation characteristics of causal risk factors. Therefore, this study provides quantitative support for understanding runway incursion risk evolution and for developing targeted prevention strategies and post-incident response measures to improve runway safety management.
Wang et al. (Sat,) studied this question.