Dodds Peter Sheridan, Watts Duncan J, Sabel Charles F
Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Columbia University, 420 W. 118th Street, New York, NY 10027, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2003 Oct 14;100(21):12516-21. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1534702100. Epub 2003 Oct 3.
The dynamics of information exchange is an important but understudied aspect of collective communication, coordination, and problem solving in a wide range of distributed systems, both physical (e.g., the Internet) and social (e.g., business firms). In this paper, we introduce a model of organizational networks according to which links are added incrementally to a hierarchical backbone and test the resulting networks under variable conditions of information exchange. Our main result is the identification of a class of multiscale networks that reduce, over a wide range of environments, the likelihood that individual nodes will suffer congestion-related failure and that the network as a whole will disintegrate when failures do occur. We call this dual robustness property of multiscale networks "ultrarobustness." Furthermore, we find that multiscale networks attain most of their robustness with surprisingly few link additions, suggesting that ultrarobust organizational networks can be generated in an efficient and scalable manner. Our results are directly relevant to the relief of congestion in communication networks and also more broadly to activities, like distributed problem solving, that require individuals to exchange information in an unpredictable manner.
信息交换动态是广泛分布式系统（包括物理系统（如互联网）和社会系统（如商业公司））中集体通信、协调和问题解决的一个重要但研究不足的方面。在本文中，我们引入了一种组织网络模型，根据该模型，链接被逐步添加到分层骨干中，并在信息交换的可变条件下测试由此产生的网络。我们的主要结果是识别出一类多尺度网络，这类网络在广泛的环境中降低了单个节点遭受与拥塞相关故障的可能性，并且当故障发生时，整个网络不会瓦解。我们将多尺度网络的这种双重鲁棒性属性称为“超鲁棒性”。此外，我们发现多尺度网络只需添加极少的链接就能获得大部分鲁棒性，这表明可以以高效且可扩展的方式生成超鲁棒组织网络。我们的结果与缓解通信网络拥塞直接相关，并且更广泛地与诸如分布式问题解决等需要个体以不可预测方式交换信息的活动相关。
