Channing Division of Network Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
College of Science, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China.
Nat Commun. 2017 Jan 31;8:14223. doi: 10.1038/ncomms14223.
An articulation point in a network is a node whose removal disconnects the network. Those nodes play key roles in ensuring connectivity of many real-world networks, from infrastructure networks to protein interaction networks and terrorist communication networks. Despite their fundamental importance, a general framework of studying articulation points in complex networks is lacking. Here we develop analytical tools to study key issues pertinent to articulation points, such as the expected number of them and the network vulnerability against their removal, in an arbitrary complex network. We find that a greedy articulation point removal process provides us a different perspective on the organizational principles of complex networks. Moreover, this process results in a rich phase diagram with two fundamentally different types of percolation transitions. Our results shed light on the design of more resilient infrastructure networks and the effective destruction of terrorist communication networks.
网络中的关节点是指删除该节点会导致网络断开的节点。这些节点在许多现实世界网络（从基础设施网络到蛋白质相互作用网络和恐怖分子通信网络）的连通性方面发挥着关键作用。尽管它们至关重要，但缺乏用于研究复杂网络中关节点的通用框架。在这里，我们开发了分析工具来研究与关节点相关的关键问题，例如它们的预期数量以及网络对其删除的脆弱性，在任意复杂网络中都是如此。我们发现，贪婪的关节点删除过程为我们提供了研究复杂网络组织原则的不同视角。此外，这个过程会导致出现一个丰富的相图，其中存在两种完全不同类型的渗流相变。我们的研究结果为设计更具弹性的基础设施网络和有效破坏恐怖分子通信网络提供了思路。
