Identification of betweenness-central groups of components in a complex network infrastructure by genetic algorithms

E. Zio & L.R. Golea Department of Energy, Polytechnic of Milan, Milan, Italy

ABSTRACT: In this paper, an analysis of the topological structure of the network system is carried out to identify the most important groups of elements of different sizes in the network. The importance is quantified in terms of group betweenness centrality.The search for the most important groups is a combinatorial problem which may be effectively tackled by evolutionary search algorithms like the genetic algorithms. The group importance problem is framed as a multiobjective search in which the decision variables are the node group compositions and the objectives are to maximize the betweenness centrality of the groups, while minimizing their dimension. This formulation guides the search towards the identification of the most important single components, pairs of components, triplets, and so forth. As an example of application, an electrical power transmission system of literature is considered.