No Arabic abstract
Many networks are used to transfer information or goods, in other words, they are navigated. The larger the network, the more difficult it is to navigate efficiently. Indeed, information routing in the Internet faces serious scalability problems due to its rapid growth, recently accelerated by the rise of the Internet of Things. Large networks like the Internet can be navigated efficiently if nodes, or agents, actively forward information based on hidden maps underlying these systems. However, in reality most agents will deny to forward messages, which has a cost, and navigation is impossible. Can we design appropriate incentives that lead to participation and global navigability? Here, we present an evolutionary game where agents share the value generated by successful delivery of information or goods. We show that global navigability can emerge, but its complete breakdown is possible as well. Furthermore, we show that the system tends to self-organize into local clusters of agents who participate in the navigation. This organizational principle can be exploited to favor the emergence of global navigability in the system.
In our daily lives, we rely on the proper functioning of supply networks, from power grids to water transmission systems. A single failure in these critical infrastructures can lead to a complete collapse through a cascading failure mechanism. Counteracting strategies are thus heavily sought after. In this article, we introduce a general framework to analyse the spreading of failures in complex networks and demonstrate that both weak and strong connections can be used to contain damages. We rigorously prove the existence of certain subgraphs, called network isolators, that can completely inhibit any failure spreading, and we show how to create such isolators in synthetic and real-world networks. The addition of selected links can thus prevent large scale outages as demonstrated for power transmission grids.
Link failures repeatedly induce large-scale outages in power grids and other supply networks. Yet, it is still not well understood, which links are particularly prone to inducing such outages. Here we analyze how the nature and location of each link impact the networks capability to maintain stable supply. We propose two criteria to identify critical links on the basis of the topology and the load distribution of the network prior to link failure. They are determined via a links redundant capacity and a renormalized linear response theory we derive. These criteria outperform critical link prediction based on local measures such as loads. The results not only further our understanding of the physics of supply networks in general. As both criteria are available before any outage from the state of normal operation, they may also help real-time monitoring of grid operation, employing counter-measures and support network planning and design.
In this paper, we design a greedy routing on networks of mobile agents. In the greedy routing algorithm, every time step a packet in agent $i$ is delivered to the agent $j$ whose distance from the destination is shortest among searched neighbors of agent $i$. Based on the greedy routing, we study the traffic dynamics and traffic-driven epidemic spreading on networks of mobile agents. We find that the transportation capacity of networks and the epidemic threshold increase as the communication radius increases. For moderate moving speed, the transportation capacity of networks is the highest and the epidemic threshold maintains a large value. These results can help controlling the traffic congestion and epidemic spreading on mobile networks.
Power grids, road maps, and river streams are examples of infrastructural networks which are highly vulnerable to external perturbations. An abrupt local change of load (voltage, traffic density, or water level) might propagate in a cascading way and affect a significant fraction of the network. Almost discontinuous perturbations can be modeled by shock waves which can eventually interfere constructively and endanger the normal functionality of the infrastructure. We study their dynamics by solving the Burgers equation under random perturbations on several real and artificial directed graphs. Even for graphs with a narrow distribution of node properties (e.g., degree or betweenness), a steady state is reached exhibiting a heterogeneous load distribution, having a difference of one order of magnitude between the highest and average loads. Unexpectedly we find for the European power grid and for finite Watts-Strogatz networks a broad pronounced bimodal distribution for the loads. To identify the most vulnerable nodes, we introduce the concept of node-basin size, a purely topological property which we show to be strongly correlated to the average load of a node.
One of the most important tasks of urban and hazard planning is to mitigate the damages and minimize the costs of the recovery process after catastrophic events. The rapidity and the efficiency of the recovery process are commonly referred to as resilience. Despite the problem of resilience quantification has received a lot of attention, a mathematical definition of the resilience of an urban community, which takes into account the social aspects of a urban environment, has not yet been identified. In this paper we provide and test a methodology for the assessment of urban resilience to catastrophic events which aims at bridging the gap between the engineering and the ecosystem approaches to resilience. We propose to model a urban system by means of different hybrid social-physical complex networks, obtained by enriching the urban street network with additional information about the social and physical constituents of a city, namely citizens, residential buildings and services. Then, we introduce a class of efficiency measures on these hybrid networks, inspired by the definition of global efficiency given in complex network theory, and we show that these measures can be effectively used to quantify the resilience of a urban system, by comparing their respective values before and after a catastrophic event and during the reconstruction process. As a case study, we consider simulated earthquakes in the city of Acerra, Italy, and we use these efficiency measures to compare the ability of different reconstruction strategies in restoring the original performance of the urban system.