Network Resilience and Robustness: Theory and Applications

Network science has opened new perspectives in the study of complex networks in social, technological, biological, and climatic systems. System structural robustness and dynamical resilience play a crucial role in reducing risk and mitigating damage. The functionality of complex networks relies on their structural robustness, the ability to retain their connectivity when a portion of their nodes or edges is removed. System dynamical resilience characterizes the ability of a system to adjust its activity to retain its basic functionality in the face of internal disturbances or external environmental changes. And critical phenomena in networks include a wide range of issues, epidemic thresholds, phase transitions, and critical points of diverse optimization problems, which have attracted the attention of researchers in several different disciplines. Furthermore, taking advantage of the network theory and real data sets, researchers have directed their interest to real-world network modeling and analysis, their resilience function, and early warning indicators.

The Research Topic is expected to report on the most original results in network resilience and robustness and to shed light on the mechanism leading to the system collapse in the network structures, the network dynamics, and network modeling. This Research Topic aims, in particular, at advancing our understanding of the fundamental principles that underpin the wide spectrum of network theory, critical phenomena, dynamical process, percolation behaviors, recovery network in networked systems, with applications ranging from biology and population dynamics to ecology, epidemics, and critical infrastructure systems. The research topic shall highlight different techniques and research approaches, based on mathematical modeling, theoretical analysis, numerical methods, algorithm, or real data.

Key areas to be covered in the collection are the analysis of structural robustness, dynamical resilience, and stability. In particular, the topics focus on critical phenomena, phase transitions, network dynamics, percolation behaviors in the network system, and network application. This Research Topic is also interested in the research of network-specific percolation models, applications to network structural analysis, and applications to network dynamics.

We look forward to receiving Original Research, Perspective, and Review articles from different areas of network science to highlight a variety of methods, mathematical techniques existing or being developed and applied in this field.