Controlling edge dynamics in complex networks

The interaction of distinct units in physical, social, biological and technological systems naturally gives rise to complex network structures. Networks have constantly been in the focus of research for the last decade, with considerable advances in the description of their structural and dynamical properties. However, much less effort has been devoted to studying the controllability of the dynamics taking place on them. Here we introduce and evaluate a dynamical process defined on the edges of a network, and demonstrate that the controllability properties of this process significantly differ from simple nodal dynamics. Evaluation of real-world networks indicates that most of them are more controllable than their randomized counterparts. We also find that transcriptional regulatory networks are particularly easy to control. Analytic calculations show that networks with scale-free degree distributions have better controllability properties than uncorrelated networks, and positively correlated in- and out-degrees enhance the controllability of the proposed dynamics.Comment: Preprint. 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. Source code available at http://github.com/ntamas/netctr

Control and Synchronization of Neuron Ensembles

Synchronization of oscillations is a phenomenon prevalent in natural, social, and engineering systems. Controlling synchronization of oscillating systems is motivated by a wide range of applications from neurological treatment of Parkinson's disease to the design of neurocomputers. In this article, we study the control of an ensemble of uncoupled neuron oscillators described by phase models. We examine controllability of such a neuron ensemble for various phase models and, furthermore, study the related optimal control problems. In particular, by employing Pontryagin's maximum principle, we analytically derive optimal controls for spiking single- and two-neuron systems, and analyze the applicability of the latter to an ensemble system. Finally, we present a robust computational method for optimal control of spiking neurons based on pseudospectral approximations. The methodology developed here is universal to the control of general nonlinear phase oscillators.Comment: 29 pages, 6 figure

On Submodularity and Controllability in Complex Dynamical Networks

Controllability and observability have long been recognized as fundamental structural properties of dynamical systems, but have recently seen renewed interest in the context of large, complex networks of dynamical systems. A basic problem is sensor and actuator placement: choose a subset from a finite set of possible placements to optimize some real-valued controllability and observability metrics of the network. Surprisingly little is known about the structure of such combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper, we show that several important classes of metrics based on the controllability and observability Gramians have a strong structural property that allows for either efficient global optimization or an approximation guarantee by using a simple greedy heuristic for their maximization. In particular, the mapping from possible placements to several scalar functions of the associated Gramian is either a modular or submodular set function. The results are illustrated on randomly generated systems and on a problem of power electronic actuator placement in a model of the European power grid.Comment: Original arXiv version of IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems paper (Volume 3, Issue 1), with a addendum (located in the ancillary documents) that explains an error in a proof of the original paper and provides a counterexample to the corresponding resul