Seminar Details
2013-04-23 (14.00) : Resilient distributed network dynamics
At Euler building
Organized by Mathematical Engineering
Speaker :
Como, Giacomo
Abstract :
Resilience has become a key issue in the analysis and design of network dynamics.
Applications are of wide range and include complex infrastructure systems, such as data, transportation and power networks, as well as social, economic and financial networks. Given a networked dynamical system, one is interested in how perturbations, typically localized on small parts of the network, can propagate through cascading mechanisms and possibly have a systemic impact on the global behavior.
This talk will focus on resilience properties of distributed routing in dynamical flow networks. Dynamical flow networks are modeled as ordinary differential equation describing mass conservation with routing policies regulating the way the total outflow at each non-destination node gets split among its outgoing links using local information. Disturbances are modeled as (possibly adversarial) reductions of the link flow capacities. A class of maximally robust distributed policies and show that, if the routing policies are allowed to use local information only from the links immediately downstream, then the resilience is in general strictly smaller than the min-cut capacity of the network, while there is no such a loss if the policies are allowed to use local information also from the links immediately upstream.
Time permitting, some recent results on resilience of distributed averaging dynamics on large-scale networks will be also presented.