title: Structural permeability of complex networks to control signals.
abstract: Many biological, social and technological systems can be described as complex networks. The goal of affecting their behaviour has motivated recent work focusing on the relationship between the network structure and its propensity to be controlled. While this work has provided insight into several relevant problems, a comprehensive approach to address partial and complete controllability of networks is still lacking. Here, we bridge this gap by developing a framework to maximize the diffusion of the control signals through a network, while taking into account physical and economic constraints that inevitably arise in applications. This approach allows us to introduce the network permeability, a unified metric of the propensity of a network to be controllable. The analysis of the permeability of several synthetic and real networks enables us to extract some structural features that deepen our quantitative understanding of the ease with which specific controllability requirements can be met.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, University of Naples Federico II, 80125 Naples, Italy.|Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of New Mexico, Albuqeurque, New Mexico 87131, USA.
authors.forename: Francesco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Lo Iudice
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, University of Naples Federico II, 80125 Naples, Italy.
authors.forename: Franco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Garofalo
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of New Mexico, Albuqeurque, New Mexico 87131, USA.
authors.forename: Francesco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Sorrentino