Empirical analysis of the worldwide maritime transportation network

In this paper we present an empirical study of the worldwide maritime transportation network (WMN) in which the nodes are ports and links are container liners connecting the ports. Using the different representations of network topology — the spaces L and P, we study the statistical properties of WMN including degree distribution, degree correlations, weight distribution, strength distribution, average shortest path length, line length distribution and centrality measures. We find that WMN is a small-world network with power law behavior. Important nodes are identified based on different centrality measures. Through analyzing weighted clustering coefficient and weighted average nearest neighbors degree, we reveal the hierarchy structure and rich-club phenomenon in the network.     

Bandwidth allocation strategy for traffic systems of scale-free network

In this Letter, the bandwidth resource allocation strategy is considered for traffic systems of complex networks. With a finite resource of bandwidth, an allocation strategy with preference parameter α is proposed considering the links importance. The performance of bandwidth allocation strategy is studied for the local routing protocol and the shortest path protocol. When important links are slightly favored in the bandwidth allocation, the system can achieve the optimal traffic performance for the two routing protocols. For the shortest path protocol, we also give a method to estimate the network traffic capacity theoretically.     

Evolution of Chinese airport network

With the rapid development of the economy and the accelerated globalization process, the aviation industry plays a more and more critical role in today’s world, in both developed and developing countries. As the infrastructure of aviation industry, the airport network is one of the most important indicators of economic growth. In this paper, we investigate the evolution of the Chinese airport network (CAN) via complex network theory. It is found that although the topology of CAN has remained steady during the past few years, there are many dynamic switchings inside the network, which have changed the relative importance of airports and airlines. Moreover, we investigate the evolution of traffic flow (passengers and cargoes) on CAN. It is found that the traffic continues to grow in an exponential form and has evident seasonal fluctuations. We also found that cargo traffic and passenger traffic are positively related but the correlations are quite different for different kinds of cities.     

Epidemic spreading in a scale-free network of regular lattices

The susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) epidemics in a scale-free network in which each node is a square lattice itself is investigated through large-scale computer simulations. The model combines a local contact process among individuals in a node (or city) with stochastic long-range infections due to people traveling between cities interconnected by the national transportation scale-free network. A nonzero epidemic threshold is found and it is approached with a power-law behavior by the density of infected individuals, as observed in the small-world network of Watts and Strogatz. Also, the epidemic propagation follows a 1/f$1/f$, hierarchical dynamics from the highly connected square lattices to the smaller degree nodes in outbreaks with sizes distributed accordingly a Gaussian function.     

Traffic dynamics in scale-free networks with tunable strength of community structure

In this paper we systematically investigate the impact of community structure on traffic dynamics in scale-free networks based on local routing strategy. A growth model is introduced to construct scale-free networks with tunable strength of community structure, and a packet routing strategy with a parameter α is used to deal with the navigation and transportation of packets simultaneously. Simulations show that the maximal network capacity stands at α=−1 in the case of identical vertex capacity and monotonously decreases with the strength of community structure which suggests that the networks with fuzzy community structure (i.e., community strength is weak) are more efficient in delivering packets than those with pronounced community structure. To explain these results, the distribution of packets of each vertex is carefully studied. Our results indicate that the moderate strength of community structure is more convenient for the information transfer of real complex systems.     

Correlations and clustering in a scale-free network in Euclidean space

Empirical study shows that many real networks in nature and society share two generic properties: they are scale-free and they display a high degree of clustering. Quite often they are modular in nature also, implying occurrences of several small tightly linked groups which are connected in a hierarchical manner among themselves. Recently, we have introduced a model of spatial scale-free network where nodes pop-up at randomly located positions in the Euclidean space and are connected to one end of the nearest link of the existing network. It has been already argued that the large scale behaviour of this network is like the Barabási-Albert model. In the present paper we briefly review these results as well as present additional results on the study of non-trivial correlations present in this model which are found to have similar behaviours as in the real-world networks. Moreover, this model naturally possesses the hierarchical characteristics lacked by most of the models of the scale-free networks.      

Intercity express bus flow in Korea and its network analysis

We investigated the express bus flow in Korea and its network topology. By using a gravity type model, we found that the bus flow between cities depends on the square root of the product of the population size of city A and the population size of city B. On the other hand, the total bus flow of a city depends on only its population size. These different dependences on population originate from the network property of the express bus network.     

Monomer-dimer model on a scale-free small-world network

The explicit determination of the number of monomer-dimer arrangements on a network is a theoretical challenge, and exact solutions to monomer-dimer problem are available only for few limiting graphs with a single monomer on the boundary, e.g., rectangular lattice and quartic lattice; however, analytical research (even numerical result) for monomer-dimer problem on scale-free small-world networks is still missing despite the fact that a vast variety of real systems display simultaneously scale-free and small-world structures. In this paper, we address the monomer-dimer problem defined on a scale-free small-world network and obtain the exact formula for the number of all possible monomer-dimer arrangements on the network, based on which we also determine the asymptotic growth constant of the number of monomer-dimer arrangements in the network. We show that the obtained asymptotic growth constant is much less than its counterparts corresponding to two-dimensional lattice and Sierpinski fractal having the same average degree as the studied network, which indicates from another aspect that scale-free networks have a fundamentally distinct architecture as opposed to regular lattices and fractals without power-law behavior.     

Scaling laws and the modern city

The inter-relations and the complexity of modern urban spaces are difficult to analyse in a way that allows improving living conditions or help to ascertain optimal decisions for saving energy or improving sustainability. Carefully designed decisions and guidelines might produce unexpected results because of particularities, or complex sets of reactions from residents or economic counterparts. Complexity tends to increase with size, such as when, for instance, services tend to concentrate in large agglomerations, and transportation needs take on critical importance. Complex systems such as living organisms are known to follow approximate relationships as scaling laws between the variables that describe them. Some of these kinds of relationships are tested in relation to modern developed urban spaces, in which it is possible to find a reasonable continuity with the types of scales seen in living organisms, and some preliminary conclusions are drawn.     

Enhancement of scale-free network attack tolerance

Despite the large size of most communication and transportation systems,there are short paths between nodes in these networks which guarantee the efficient information,data and passenger delivery;furthermore these networks have a surprising tolerance under random errors thanks to their inherent scale-free topology.However,their scale-free topology also makes them fragile under intentional attacks,leaving us a challenge on how to improve the network robustness against intentional attacks without losing their strong tolerance under random errors and high message and passenger delivering capacity.Here we propose two methods (SL method and SH method) to enhance scale-free network’s tolerance under attack in different conditions.     

Weighted complex network analysis of travel routes on the Singapore public transportation system

The structure and properties of public transportation networks have great implications for urban planning, public policies and infectious disease control. We contribute a complex weighted network analysis of travel routes on the Singapore rail and bus transportation systems. We study the two networks using both topological and dynamical analyses. Our results provide additional evidence that a dynamical study adds to the information gained by traditional topological analysis, providing a richer view of complex weighted networks. For example, while initial topological measures showed that the rail network is almost fully connected, dynamical measures highlighted hub nodes that experience disproportionately large traffic. The dynamical assortativity of the bus networks also differed from its topological counterpart. In addition, inspection of the weighted eigenvector centralities highlighted a significant difference in traffic flows for both networks during weekdays and weekends, suggesting the importance of adding a temporal perspective missing from many previous studies.     

Empirical analysis of dependence between stations in Chinese railway network

A railway transportation system can be represented by a bipartite network consisting of trains and stations, where a train is connected to all stations where it stops. In this paper, motivated by the resource-allocation process taking place on networks, we design a method to project a Chinese train-station bipartite network into a weighted station network. A new metric is proposed to quantify the dependence between pairs of stations, which is shown to follow a shifted power-law distribution. In addition, we compare the resource-allocation method and the well-known multiple-edge method, and the results indicate that our proposed method is more reasonable.     

Epidemic spreading on a scale-free network with awareness

This paper presents a modified susceptible-infected-recovered(SIR) model with the effects of awareness and vaccination to study the epidemic spreading on scale-free networks based on the mean-field theory.In this model,when susceptible individuals receive awareness from their infected neighbor nodes,they will take vaccination measures.The theoretical analysis and the numerical simulations show that the existence of awareness and vaccination can significantly improve the epidemic threshold and reduce the risk of virus outbreaks.In addition,regardless of the existence of vaccination,the awareness can increase the spreading threshold and slow the spreading speed effectively.For a given awareness and a certain spreading rate,the total number of infections reduces with the increasing vaccination rate.     

Emergency response to disaster-struck scale-free network with redundant systems

Disasters cause tremendous damage every year. In this paper, we have specifically studied emergency response to disaster-struck scale-free networks when some nodes in the network have redundant systems. If one node collapses, its redundant system will substitute it to work for a period of time. In the first part, according to the network structure, several redundant strategies have been formulated, and then our studies focused on their effectiveness by means of simulation. Results show that the strategy based on total degrees is the most effective one. However, many nodes still collapse in the end if redundant systems do not have sufficient capability, so emergency responses are necessary. Several emergent strategies controlling the distribution of external resources have been proposed in the second part. The effectiveness of those emergent strategies are then studied from three aspects, such as the effect of strategies on spreading processes, minimum sufficient quantities of external resources and determination of the most appropriate emergent strategy. In addition, the effects of redundant intensity on these aspects have been discussed as well.     

Mitigation strategies on scale-free networks against cascading failures

According to the dynamic characteristics of the cascading propagation, we introduce a mitigation mechanism and propose four mitigation methods on four types of nodes. By the normalized average avalanche size and a new measure, we demonstrate the efficiencies of the mitigation strategies on enhancing the robustness of scale-free networks against cascading failures and give the order of the effectiveness of the mitigation strategies. Surprisingly, we find that only adopting once mitigation mechanism on a small part of the overload nodes can dramatically improve the robustness of scale-free networks. In addition, we also show by numerical simulations that the optimal mitigation method strongly depends on the total capacities of all nodes in a network and the distribution of the load in the cascading model. Therefore, according to the protection strength for scale-free networks, by the distribution of the load and the protection price of networks, we can reasonably select how many nodes and which mitigation method to efficiently protect scale-free networks at the lower price. These findings may be very useful for avoiding various cascading-failure-induced disasters in the real world and for leading to insights into the mitigation of cascading failures.     

Iterative decomposition of Barabasi-Albert scale-free networks

We study a decomposition process where all nodes with a targeted degree are removed from the network. Each removal step results in changes in the degrees of the remaining nodes, and other nodes may attain the targeted degree. The processes continue iteratively until no more nodes with the targeted degree are present in the decomposed network. The network model used in our study is the well known Barabasi-Albert network, that is built with an iterative growth based on preferential attachment. Our results show an exponential decay of the number of nodes removed at each step. The total number of nodes removed in the whole process depends on the targeted degree and decay with a power law controlled by the same exponent as the degree distribution of the network.     

Onset of power-law scaling behavior in idiotypic random and scale-free networks

We numerically study the dynamics of model immune networks with random and scale-free topologies. We observe that a memory state is reached when the antigen is attached to the most connected sites of the network, whereas a percolation state may occur when the antigen attaches to the less connected sites. For increasing values of the connectivity of the antibody directly binded to the antigen, its population converges exponentially to the asymptotic value of the memory state. On the other hand, the next-nearest populations evolve slowly as power-laws towards the virgin-like state.     

面向成本-收益好的无标度耦合网络构建方法

较大平均路径长度的网络会带来较大的网络延迟, 难以支持时间敏感业务与应用. 通过增加连接可以降低源和目的节点之间的跳数, 进而降低网络平均延迟, 使得更加快速地传播信息, 但是增加连接的同时也增加了网络构建成本. 分层网络是研究网络耦合的一个有效方法, 但目前网络构建过程中将每层网络分别处理并认为每层网络之间没有强相关性. 本文提出了一种面向成本-收益的无标度网络动态构建方法. 此方法将网络分为多层, 基于连续论在高层网络中添加连接, 使得网络演化为无标度网络. 此连续过程包括节点度增加过程和局部网络半径增长两个连续过程, 在增加连接的过程中引入表征网络构建成本和收益的成本-收益指标. 模拟结果表明引入成本-收益指标的无标度耦合网络构建方法能够在合理范围内有效降低网络平均路径长度, 提升网络性能, 并且本文给出了耦合网络的动态业务性能, 通过调整高层网络避免网络拥塞.     

Hierarchy in the growing scale-free network with local rules

A new model of the clustering-driven growing network is presented and studied. Numerical and analytical results show that the pure clustering-driven addition of the certain pattern is not responsible for the resulting network hierarchy and scale-free structure. Introduction of local rules leads to the desired properties of the network, independently of the node attachment kernel.