Prof. Ying-Cheng Lai
Department of Electrical Engineering
Arizona State University, Tempe
Complex networks arising in many natural and man-made systems are scale-free in that their connectivity (or degree) distributions follow an algebraic law. In such a network, a small subset of nodes can be significantly more important than others. From the standpoint of security, this means that the network can be fragile as attack on one or few nodes in this group can have a devastating effect. In particular, since those nodes typically handle a substantial fraction of loads necessary for the normal operation of the network, an attack to disable one or few of these nodes means that their loads will be redistributed to other nodes. Because the amount of the redistributed load can be large, this can cause other nodes in the network to fail, if their loads exceed their capacities, which in turn causes more loads to be redistributed, and so on. This cascading process can continue until the network becomes totally disintegrated. In this talk the speaker will present theoretical and computational approaches to cascading dynamics on complex networks and articulate control strategies to mitigate cascades.