Activity centrality-based critical node identification in complex systems against cascade failure

Identifying critical nodes in the network has been a concern permanently. Cascading failure would cause catastrophic events, and in the field of cascading failure in complex networks, the structure and dynamics are considered as the key in the process of cascading failure. It is vital to have an applicable centrality to find critical nodes that could control and prevent the cascading failure. In this paper, we propose a steady-state activity centrality to evaluate the importance of each node, and the proposed centrality is related to the degree of each node and the activity of its neighbor nodes. The giant component, the average activity, and the tipping point under different attack strategies are introduced to compare the attack effect of these three centralities including steady-state activity centrality, betweenness centrality and closeness centrality. The results show that the attack effect under the proposed centrality is better than the effect under the other two centralities. In particular, for the network with the SIS and gene regulation dynamic, the attack effect under the steady-state activity centrality driven strategy is obviously better than the effect under the betweenness centrality driven strategy when the network is heterogeneous.