Berlin 2012 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 19: Symposium SYND: Control of Network Dynamics (with DY and SOE)

BP 19.1: Hauptvortrag

Donnerstag, 29. März 2012, 09:30–10:00, H 0105

Controlling Complex Networks with Compensatory Perturbations — •Adilson E. Motter — Department of Physics & Astronomy and NICO, Northwestern University, USA

A fundamental property of networks is that the perturbation of one node can affect other nodes, in a process that may cause the entire or a substantial part of the system to change behavior and possibly collapse. Recent research in metabolic and ecological networks has demonstrated that network damage caused by external perturbations can often be mitigated or reversed by the application of compensatory perturbations. Compensatory perturbations are constrained to be physically admissible and amenable to implementation on the network. However, the systematic identification of compensatory perturbations that conform to these constraints remains an open problem. Here, I will present a method to construct compensatory perturbations that can control the fate of general networks under such constraints. Our approach accounts for the full nonlinear behavior of real complex networks and can bring the system to a desired target state even when this state is not directly accessible. Applications to genetic networks show that compensatory perturbations are effective even when limited to a small fraction of all nodes and that they are far more effective when these are the highest-degree nodes in the network. The versatility of our methodology is illustrated through applications to associative-memory, power-grid, and food-web networks. The approach is conceptually simple and computationally efficient, making it suitable for the rescue, control, and reprogramming of large complex networks in various domains.