Chao Duan, Takashi Nishikawa, and Adilson E. Motter

PNAS 119 (32) e2122566119

The control of large-scale networks is a pressing problem of relevance to numerous natural and engineered systems. Despite recent advances in network and control science, there has been a lack of fundamental understanding about the network properties that can enable effective and efficient control of such systems. Here, we demonstrate that network locality, which we show to be a rather common property, can dramatically improve our ability to control large-scale networks. In particular, we demonstrate that locality can be exploited to substantially simplify the task of controlling nonlinear networks for desirable dynamical performance while minimizing the control effort. Our theory and algorithms provide a unified framework and show that local computation and communication suffice to achieve near-optimal control outcomes.

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