Generating Robust and Efficient Networks Under Targeted Attacks

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to modify networks to improve their robustness against attacks while maintaining efficiency, resulting in networks with high assortativity and onion-like structures.

Contribution

The authors propose a procedure to enhance network robustness and efficiency simultaneously, aligning with networks optimized for resilience and specific structural properties.

Findings

Networks modified by the procedure are highly robust against targeted attacks.

The generated networks exhibit high assortativity and onion-like structures.

The method maintains high efficiency despite increased robustness.

Abstract

Much of our commerce and traveling depend on the efficient operation of large scale networks. Some of those, such as electric power grids, transportation systems, communication networks, and others, must maintain their efficiency even after several failures, or malicious attacks. We outline a procedure that modifies any given network to enhance its robustness, defined as the size of its largest connected component after a succession of attacks, whilst keeping a high efficiency, described in terms of the shortest paths among nodes. We also show that this generated set of networks is very similar to networks optimized for robustness in several aspects such as high assortativity and the presence of an onion-like structure.