<p>Intercity freight flows vary within the year, especially for seasonal commodities such as fruit, yet many freight-network studies still rely on annually aggregated static networks. Using fulfillment records for fruit shipments from a leading digital freight platform in China, we construct monthly and seasonal directed weighted origin–destination (OD) flow networks for December 2022–November 2023. The analysis asks whether seasonal variation is associated with changes in hub roles, community structure, and OD-graph connectivity at three structural levels: node, community, and network. The results show a stable consumption-side core and a more variable production-side core. Among monthly top-10% strength nodes, consumption-oriented inbound hubs show a 75% twelve-month persistence rate, whereas production-oriented outbound hubs show an approximately 81% twelve-month replacement rate. Seasonal snapshots also differ in community granularity and observed OD connectivity: summer contains more direct OD relations, whereas spring and winter require more graph-theoretic intermediary steps to connect city pairs in the OD relation graph. These graph paths describe connectivity in the observed OD relation network, not physical truck routes or transshipment chains. A cross-commodity comparison with electronics and a seasonal PPML gravity model delimit the scope of the findings and show that the observed patterns are consistent with spatial-interaction mechanisms. The study suggests that, in dense platform-mediated OD networks, seasonal reconfiguration is expressed mainly through weighted flow concentration, core-node turnover, and community-level weight allocation rather than through binary connectivity alone.</p>

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Seasonal Reconfiguration of Platform-Mediated Fruit Freight Flow Networks: A Directed Weighted OD-Flow Analysis in China

  • Haoyu Zheng,
  • Hongbo Qu,
  • Bo Song,
  • Hui Zhang,
  • Yu-Rong Song

摘要

Intercity freight flows vary within the year, especially for seasonal commodities such as fruit, yet many freight-network studies still rely on annually aggregated static networks. Using fulfillment records for fruit shipments from a leading digital freight platform in China, we construct monthly and seasonal directed weighted origin–destination (OD) flow networks for December 2022–November 2023. The analysis asks whether seasonal variation is associated with changes in hub roles, community structure, and OD-graph connectivity at three structural levels: node, community, and network. The results show a stable consumption-side core and a more variable production-side core. Among monthly top-10% strength nodes, consumption-oriented inbound hubs show a 75% twelve-month persistence rate, whereas production-oriented outbound hubs show an approximately 81% twelve-month replacement rate. Seasonal snapshots also differ in community granularity and observed OD connectivity: summer contains more direct OD relations, whereas spring and winter require more graph-theoretic intermediary steps to connect city pairs in the OD relation graph. These graph paths describe connectivity in the observed OD relation network, not physical truck routes or transshipment chains. A cross-commodity comparison with electronics and a seasonal PPML gravity model delimit the scope of the findings and show that the observed patterns are consistent with spatial-interaction mechanisms. The study suggests that, in dense platform-mediated OD networks, seasonal reconfiguration is expressed mainly through weighted flow concentration, core-node turnover, and community-level weight allocation rather than through binary connectivity alone.