Papers › Prevalence and scalable control of localized networks
Prevalence and scalable control of localized networks
Chao Duan, Takashi Nishikawa, Adilson E. Motter
The ability to control network dynamics is essential for ensuring desirable functionality of many technological, biological, and social systems. Such systems often consist of a large number of network elements, and controlling large-scale networks remains challenging because the computation and communication requirements increase prohibitively fast with network size. Here, we introduce a notion of network locality that can be exploited to make the control of networks scalable even when the dynamics are nonlinear. We show that network locality is captured by an information metric and is almost universally observed across real and model networks. In localized networks, the optimal control actions and system responses are both shown to be necessarily concentrated in small neighborhoods induced by the information metric. This allows us to develop localized algorithms for determining network controllability and optimizing the placement of driver nodes. This also allows us to develop a localized algorithm for designing local feedback controllers that approach the performance of the corresponding best global controllers while incurring a computational cost orders-of-magnitude lower. We validate the locality, performance, and efficiency of the algorithms in Kuramoto oscillator networks as well as three large empirical networks: synchronization dynamics in the Eastern U.S. power grid, epidemic spreading mediated by the global air transportation network, and Alzheimer's disease dynamics in a human brain network. Taken together, our results establish that large networks can be controlled with computation and communication costs comparable to those for small networks.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections