Balancing building and maintenance costs in growing transport networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how balancing building and maintenance costs influences the growth and efficiency of transport networks, revealing tradeoffs, optimal strategies, and correlations through a non-equilibrium model and empirical ant network analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a non-equilibrium model capturing the interplay of costs in network growth and demonstrates its relevance to real ant transport networks.

Findings

Cost balance leads to tradeoffs between network length and efficiency.

Optimal construction strategies emerge from cost considerations.

Empirical ant networks show similar optimization strategies across species.

Abstract

The costs associated to the length of links impose unavoidable constraints to the growth of natural and artificial transport networks. When future network developments can not be predicted, building and maintenance costs require competing minimization mechanisms, and can not be optimized simultaneously. Hereby, we study the interplay of building and maintenance costs and its impact on the growth of transportation networks through a non-equilibrium model of network growth. We show cost balance is a sufficient ingredient for the emergence of tradeoffs between the network's total length and transport effciency, of optimal strategies of construction, and of power-law temporal correlations in the growth history of the network. Analysis of empirical ant transport networks in the framework of this model suggests different ant species may adopt similar optimization strategies.