A Genetic Algorithm for Enhancing the Robustness of Complex Networks through Link Protection

An important challenge in complex networks is the improvement of network robustness. Electrical networks, water/gas networks and telecommunication networks are representative examples of infrastructures distributing critical resources for our society that require high level of robustness. In this paper, we propose a method based on Genetic Algorithms to enhance network robustness focusing on the protection of the link whose removal would severely increase the effective graph resistance. Derived from the field of electric circuit analysis, effective graph resistance is a robustness measure that can be computed as a cumulative sum of the inverses of the N-1 largest eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix associated with the network. Simulations on real-world and synthetic networks show that our method in most cases equals the exhaustive search and also outperforms other heuristic strategies.