Sufficient Control of Complex Networks

Xiang Li, Guoqi Li, Leitao Gao, Beibei Li, Gaoxi Xiao

In this paper, we propose to study on sufficient control of complex networks which is to control a sufficiently large portion of the network, where only the quantity of controllable nodes matters. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such a problem is investigated. We prove that the sufficient controllability problem can be converted into a minimum cost flow problem, for which an algorithm can be easily devised with polynomial complexity. Further, we study the problem of minimum-cost sufficient control, which is to drive a sufficiently large subset of the network nodes to any predefined state with the minimum cost using a given number of controllers. It is proved that the problem is NP-hard. We propose an ``extended $L_{\mathrm{0}}$-norm-constraint-based Projected Gradient Method" (eLPGM) algorithm which may achieve suboptimal solutions for the problems at small or medium sizes. To tackle the large-scale problems, we propose to convert the control problem into a graph algorithm problem, and devise an efficient low-complexity ``Evenly Divided Control Paths" (EDCP) algorithm to tackle the graph problem. Simulation results on both synthetic and real-life networks are provided, demonstrating the satisfactory performance of the proposed methods.

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