In complex network-coupled dynamical systems, two questions of central
importance are how to identify the most vulnerable components and how to devise
a network making the overall system more robust to external perturbations. To
address these two questions, we investigate the response of complex networks of
coupled oscillators to local perturbations. We quantify the magnitude of the
resulting excursion away from the unperturbed synchronous state through
quadratic performance measures in the angle or frequency deviations. We find
that the most fragile oscillators in a given network are identified by
centralities constructed from network resistance distances. Further defining
the global robustness of the system from the average response over ensembles of
homogeneously distributed perturbations, we find that it is given by a family
of topological indices known as generalized Kirchhoff indices. Both resistance
centralities and Kirchhoff indices are obtained from a spectral decomposition
of the stability matrix of the unperturbed dynamics and can be expressed in
terms of resistance distances. We investigate the properties of these
topological indices in small-world and regular networks. In the case of
oscillators with homogeneous inertia and damping coefficients, we find that
inertia only has small effects on robustness of coupled oscillators. Numerical
results illustrate the validity of the theory.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figure